Agree. Obsession and curiousity is important. To me you either have that or you don't have that. (Edit: Of course it depends on the subject for sure. You can be curious about one thing but "phone it in" about something else.)
I'm not a programmer but I can write some things that are helpful to me. The other day I made some tea and I then thought "hmm I will buy a timer on Amazon". Then I though "no let me write something that I can use from the shell to tell me when N time period is up and what it is up for". [1] I then probably spent the next hour or so writing this little routine when all I had done was getup to make tea. Because even though I am not a programmer I decided it was more interesting than what I was working on at the time (which is also pretty interesting).
Back to something that I do know about (negotiation and strategy) I go with your first sentence for sure.
[1] In other words instead of using the iphone timer or any number of other ways to do the same exact thing I just decided it was more fun to write something to do what I wanted. And it was fun. And when I showed it to my wife that evening (as an example of why I think our 10 year old should do programming) she couldn't understand why I thought what I did was fun to do.