"Follow your passion" can be a valuable outlook on life. The overly broad interpretation of that is what many people find confusing.
I think it's fair to say that most engineers have a passion for coding/engineering. Without it spending most of one's waking hours coding would be absolutely unsustainable. Finding passion in this context is about finding the right niche for your work, not switching your career to something else you would (potentially) enjoy, like playing video games. We need to acknowledge that not every hobby or interest is that mythical passion we should view as a career opportunity.
Being an engineer doesn't define one's work: spending 2 years of your life on building a new ads format at Meta is technically the same profession as e.g. developing better models for predicting climate change, but the passion factor will be different for different people.
An attainable goal for most people is: a job reasonably well suited to your talents, which you usually don't mind doing, and which pays reasonably well.
Actually having a passion for it -- well, that's a would-be-nice. Not a gotta-have.
And for a lot of people who do have a passion, turning it into the nine to five kind of ruins it. I think it's a pretty rare sort of person who can really love their job for a long time.
What is worse is then once you have done your job. You have no left over energy for your own projects anymore. As you have basically consumed the energy you would for your own projects into the job. The only way it works is if you have a passion for something AND for doing it for someone else.
A career you don't hate, sure. But also a job that's not so toxic that you are exhausted at the end of the day. That's the theory of the day job: in many disciplines it's tough to get to the point where your discipline will comfortably support you. In the meantime there is nothing wrong with a day job. Just, a day job that's not toxic. So you can pursue your discipline the rest of the time.
I expect, for most of these, the problem is stopping at the one-liner. The one-liner is not a complete recipe. Often the one-liner is catchy but misses the point entirely. Always, the one-liner needs pages of details.
the missing ingredient is teaching kids and exposing them to things that would help them develop a passion.
and more importantly help them to develop a purpose.
for myself i believe that the very purpose of life is to contribute to the advancement of civilization. iaw: do something useful for the world. no matter how small. developing a passion from that is much easier
this also solves the problem of ruining a passion if it is turned into work because do something useful is a higher order value.
I think it's fair to say that most engineers have a passion for coding/engineering. Without it spending most of one's waking hours coding would be absolutely unsustainable. Finding passion in this context is about finding the right niche for your work, not switching your career to something else you would (potentially) enjoy, like playing video games. We need to acknowledge that not every hobby or interest is that mythical passion we should view as a career opportunity.
Being an engineer doesn't define one's work: spending 2 years of your life on building a new ads format at Meta is technically the same profession as e.g. developing better models for predicting climate change, but the passion factor will be different for different people.