Talent Is Overrated spends a considerable amount of time talking about this topic. Over the past few years, the more I began to reject the notion of passion being a prerequisite to growth, the more adapt I was at switching perspectives to continue to drive growth. There are a remarkable amount of times at work where I have zero passion for my current task, but I can surprise myself with a beautifully written solution.
If we remove the phrase passion from being a prerequisite to being a highly competent developer, we can begin to view this problem in a proper context. The issue is we're failing to adequately define how to go from being an apprentice through being a master developer. This gets even murkier when you consider job roles in organizations that do not care about this distinction, but we aught to do our best to define a general framework that anyone interested in could use and apply. We could look at finer art fields and see what principles we could apply. For instance, from music, I learned to love music by playing just difficult enough music to keep me interested, but not hard enough to get frustrated enough to quit. I never had personal teachers because my parents didn't have enough money, but I used my resources the best I could. There came a point after playing music for a number of years that the patterns started to emerge that I began asking the right questions and got lead into music theory. This happened a decade after playing, but within a few months my view of music was forever altered. I called it "just in time learning", and it's something I've tried to do with mentors of my own. There are quite a few topics in computer science that are better learned over time through rote memorization, but the part that I think we're failing to address is giving students a platform to build off of on their own. Every reputable fine art program makes extensive use of studio time where students are given ambitious projects with loosely defined parameters in conjunction with their theoretical courses. The supplement each other and provide the bedrock for a young artist to grow on.
What I'm failing to articulate is, passion is not mandatory to learn. In fact, I would say if used inappropriately, it can be destructive to a new learner of a skill. Once they hit their first brick wall and have no one to turn too, they might feel they aren't passionate enough and give up. When in reality, if they were given a different perspective, they might have easily overcome the challenge and moved on. Not every skill set can be sexy, and not every task can be passionate. The man that is responsible for tuning concert pianos with a live crowd are extremely talented, but most are not passionate about tuning pianos. We are looking at this as a problem with students, when in reality the problem is with the program and the teachers.