You could rephrase the whole article, "Just do anything enough to get good at it. It doesn't matter what you want or like."
My response: "yes, it really does."
My response: "yes, it really does."
You have to progress beyond the initial period of total incompetence, where nothing is fun. Your guitar strings buzz mutely, you keep dropping your hand and your opponent punches you in the face, and javac keeps yelling at you about "array index out of bounds." After that, though, the increasing success in the activity becomes a positive feedback loop, increasing your desire to practice it. The end result is what any reasonable person would call passion.
On the other hand, take the example from the article: the bored web developer spends "a few years" mastering Ruby on Rails. Oops, by then RoR is yesterday's news, now it's Clouds and Hadoop and Clojure and [insert technology/language/architecture du jour here]. So I think what you need to work on is not mastering something like "Ruby on Rails" but something at a higher level of abstraction... skills and habits that let you remain proficient and passionate about your craft even as the technological sands shift under you. I'm not sure how to really articulate what these are.
Another more recent example that may pass into that peculiar state of "everybody agrees its common sense but by golly I sure see an awful lot of violations of it every week" is being suspicious of mutable state. I'm not quite 100% sold on the "never use mutable state" idea (getting closer every month, though...), but I sure am 100% sold on being suspicious of it. Doesn't matter what your environment is, that carries over. A lot of stuff does.
I agree that you need to get past the initial total incompetence, but redefining "passion" to mean "something you worked on for a long time" is ignoring or denying the idea that passion means enjoyment.
In short, his point is that you should stop trying to discover your passion and start creating it.
Yes. That's what he saying. That you can pick any of those interests, and that it doesn't matter which.
He's doing that partially by redefining "passion" to mean "something you've done long enough to be good at it", which is strongly at odds with the colloquial definition, which involves liking it.
Passion: The feeling that arises from having mastered a skill that earns you recognition and rewards.
He did not toss out the "like" or even the "love" from the idea. The feeling is the exact same. What he changed is how that feeling comes about.
If you have an interest in something, that means you like it at least enough to explore it further. What he is saying is that if you like something, you can work at it and get to the point where you've turned a simple "like" into a "passion".
I suppose he could be saying "before you done something for awhile, you probably won't like it." That would be a statement with more content. It's a different argument than the one he made, though.