There's this concept called the overjustification effect. And once you see it, you notice it everywhere.
The classic example is kids drawing. Give a child paper and crayons, they'll draw for hours. Zero prompting needed. Now tell them you'll pay them a dollar per drawing.
Tiny boost at first. Then it drops off. And eventually, they just... stop wanting to draw.
The external reward didn't add to the fun. It replaced it.
I think about this a lot with content.
When I started TalkBitz, I was writing because I wanted to figure things out. That was the whole point. Then traffic came, then income came, and suddenly I was watching dashboards more than I was thinking about ideas.
Not saying money is bad. It's obviously not. But there's a real thing that happens when your brain shifts from "I want to do this" to "I need this to perform."
The work starts feeling different. Heavier. And the curiosity that made it good in the first place gets a lot quieter.
I don't have a clean fix for it. I'm still working on keeping some part of the writing separate from the metrics.
Some posts I write just because I want to write them.
Probably not a system you can scale. But it might be the thing that keeps you going.
Came across this in a piece by Matt Johnson at Neuroscience Of, worth a read if any of this felt familiar.