most people's passion is money too. just that they don't say it. or they pretend to be politically correct even when posting anonymously online. or they don't know that they're pretending. how passionate can you be when you work for someone? i hate it when people say they're passionate in a very specialized area (e.g. forward swap strategies for interest rate derivatives, or deep-water oil spill cleanup operations), especially when they said they had wanted to do it all their life.