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I wonder when exactly the follow your passion became such a driving force. I'm GenX raised by Silent Generation parents who had blue collar roots though had moved to white collar middle class jobs (though were never very economically stable). The need to go to college (and get a scholarship to do so) was drilled into my head starting in kindergarten. The closest thing I ever heard regarding passion was my dad telling me to find a job I love or one that would pay me enough to enjoy my time outside of work. But then again, they also sent me to a fancy private college (see scholarship) where discussing job propects just did happen and the only expected path was grad school. And I majored in something with little obvious job prospects, so I guess I absorbed some of the passion stuff even if it wasn't so clearly articulated.

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There's been some good work on this — Miya Tokumitsu's DO WHAT YOU LOVE was my go-to when writing Can't Even — and it really became dominant in the late '90s/early 2000s (there's this crucial Steve Jobs speech at Stanford whose thesis is basically DO WHAT YOU LOVE OR ELSE IT'S ALL MEANINGLESS!)

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