It's not cool to be passionate. It's always been cool to be intelligent though.
EDIT:
I did not mean to say that being passionate is bad. I meant to say that in most social situations, appearing overly passionate is often bad. Right now, I am struggling to maintain passion for the project I'm working on and I know that I will fail as soon as I stop being passionate about it -- so I know there are hard times when passion is necessary. However I think that my point about appearing "cool" holds -- more people get excited about my projects when I put up an impression of total control and slight lack of passion rather than the other way around.
One has to know how to program both oneself and others.
It depends on what you are passionate about. Passion drives people to accomplish things, keeps them focused, and provides motivation. Being passionate about your work, your research, your art can all be very positive things.
Being passionate about a brand though is probably less of a good thing for you personally.
No great thing was ever accomplished without being passionate.Even the research field which is all about intellectualism needs you to be passionate about your ideas and ploughing away at them even though they are just untested hypotheses till it gets proved
Problem is, one needs to be passionate about the right things from the very beginning -- and, paradoxically, the only way to decide objectively which things are worth being passionate about is to start off being dispassionate about them.
But you do not need to be passionate about the right things from the beginning. For one thing, it is possible to move into a field late in life and make enormous advances. Fermat provided a brilliant example of this.
Of course, you could say Fermat was an outlier, but I suspect that anyone who is truly, deeply passionate about something is an outlier already. Most people go through their lives with little passion at all.
I was passionate about zoology during some of the formative years of my life.
I realized later that unless I become the next Darwin, I will never be happy with my career choice because I will be doomed to working for a large part of my life for people less intelligent than myself and that I will not grow as a person because of that.
EDIT:
I did not mean to say that being passionate is bad. I meant to say that in most social situations, appearing overly passionate is often bad. Right now, I am struggling to maintain passion for the project I'm working on and I know that I will fail as soon as I stop being passionate about it -- so I know there are hard times when passion is necessary. However I think that my point about appearing "cool" holds -- more people get excited about my projects when I put up an impression of total control and slight lack of passion rather than the other way around.
One has to know how to program both oneself and others.