More From "This Passion Thing Is Way Overrated"
I found another blog posting about passion - more of a quote really, although it generated some great explanations - on Bob Sutton's Work Matters. The quote is #2 on his "Ten Things I Believe" list:

Indifference is as important as passion.

Someone else believes the same as me!

I've believed for years that even if you love something (the way I love music, movies, theatre and a bunch of other things) then it's ok, if not totally necessary, to have a good dose of healthy disregard for it also. You need to be able to see the parts that don't work, that are dumb, boring, "not all that," and you need to get away from it too.

Any really cool thing I've done in the past (Philadelphia-DC AIDS Ride, performing at Carnegie Hall or at the Kennedy Center Honors, writing a full-length play and seeing it performed onstage) has always been followed by a feeling of having to get far away from it. I always thought this was a negative quality in me - some sort of laziness inherent in my immoral being - but now I'm really seeing that it's a necessary part. The trick is to come back to it at some point, because there may be new things that have come up in the interim that'll take me to the next step.

In other words, I've had to become indifferent to some things I'm passionate about in order to continue that passion further.

Plus, that indifference may have kept me from pursuing a course of action that I thought I needed to pursue (writing another play, even though I didn't have an idea for one), instead of the action I wanted to pursue (starting to write screenplays that were actually there in my head).