The biggest problem with "follow your passion" is that, in truth, if you're passionate about something, you'll absolutely fucking hate doing it as a subordinate. This means you'll probably never reach the level of autonomy at which work becomes fun, and your "passion" will die.
Occasionally you're lucky and fall into a mentor/protege relationship where you don't feel like a subordinate, but that's not common. You shouldn't count on that, especially in the "cool" careers that are spam-clogged with incompetent wannabes and in which it's hard to distinguish oneself.
Self-determination Theory claims there are basically 3 things you need to be happy at work: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The bad news is that at almost any job, you'll lack at least two of these when you start. The good news is that it's fairly easy to gain more of each of these simply by advancing in your career.
Note that different people need different levels of Autonomy/Competence/Relatedness to be happy. I have no problem following orders, but I would go crazy at a place that expected me to be in the office from 9-6 every day. For others, freedom might mean starting their own business and not taking orders from anybody.
In general though, it helps to figure out what the right levels of autonomy/competence/relatedness are for you, and how you can achieve them in the next few years. "Expect to feel 'meh' about your job for a few years before you build up career capital" is much more accurate than "follow your passion and you'll be happy."
Today we've had an interesting discussion at our startup about subordination, and stumbled into a question where do good technical leaders come from.
Our CTO's thesis was that no sane technical person wants to be a boss; rather, he'd be doing "real interesting stuff", real science and technology, but someone needs to take responsibility for the project, and it also pays well.
My answer to this was that yes, being chief is not much fun, but if you really care about "real interesting stuff", you'll want to do it in the best possible way, and you quickly realize that you could make use of some subordinates, then teach some engineers... Eventually you find yourself in director's seat.
In the top-down management context, being a manager is almost as bad as being managed. You're still a subordinate in truth, but you are now responsible for motivating other people to do things they don't want to do. You don't get to set priorities, but your career has been bet on the work of other people (your subordinates). So it's the worst of both worlds.
Additionally, managers in a top-down world are constantly struggling to establish themselves as legitimate leaders of the group (without resorting to, "Fuck you, I can fire you.") They're puppet leaders picked from above, and often not the leaders the group would pick. This often creates a lot of tension.
There's good and bad in management. The good aspect is mentoring others, coordinating efforts, building teams, and solving large-scale problems. The bad is the extortionate kind, which is the "if I don't like you, no one here does" idiocy (seen in high-stakes performance review games) that causes so many people to hate management. But when the boss has a bad boss there are no other options for him.
I'm not talking about 'traditional' strict hierarchies, but rather about ~3-storey organically evolved scheme where leadership is quite informal and firing is really not an option: our company is quite young and people are the most valuable asset. Also, some of us would gladly accept firing but will keep working otherwise.
Thus we have no way other than reaching mutually satisfactory state.
Occasionally you're lucky and fall into a mentor/protege relationship where you don't feel like a subordinate, but that's not common. You shouldn't count on that, especially in the "cool" careers that are spam-clogged with incompetent wannabes and in which it's hard to distinguish oneself.