"Follow your passion" is misleading advice

I think it's misleading when someone tells you "You should love what you're doing at work", what they usually mean is "I master what I'm doing at work and I'm leveraging my mastery to get things I deeply care about (money, meaning, social status and relationships, free trips, free lunches, and any other thing that's for free) and it's a great feeling to get those things".

But suppose you ask the same person "How were you feeling when you started learning what you are doing now at work?". In that case, I don't think they will say "I loved every second of learning and sucking at it for the first few days/weeks/months". Being a beginner is by design uncomfortable, expect it to be that way, not to love what you do from day one.

Choosing a career path is a difficult question to answer definitively, the only constants are: decent social relationships/status and enough money to cover the basics because we are social animals who live in a capitalist world.

Other variables include your "innate" talent in something, your "innate" curiosity about something, and a potential positive impact on the world. These are nice to have.

But in any case, don't expect the process to be easy or to love what you do from day one: even Messi had to work for years and years to become the greatest player of all time, he started in the Barcelona senior team in 2004 and took him 5 years to win his first Ballon d'Or in 2009, he started in Argentina senior national team in 2005 and took him 16 years to win the first trophy with them in 2021 (Copa América), and it took him 18 years of playing to win the world cup in 2022.