I one-hundred percent agree with your comment. It's all about the learning process and what makes you curious to learning something more on a topic. Doing forced projects is a quick way to burn yourself out if you are not completely interested.
+1! The only IT people worth their salt are those who have natural curiosity. Without it, you cannot sustain learning as technology evolves and the industry changes, and your skills will become irrelevant. Incidentally, this is probably why a lot of formally trained CS / software engineering grads actually suck. They never put 2+2 together for themselves, out of interest, in their own time, for fun.