Happy Hump Day {{first_name | Toaster}} 🐪 ,

We’ve been taught to think motivation comes after achievement. Get the promotion, hit the bonus, earn the praise, and then you’ll finally feel driven, fulfilled, and excited to work. But psychology research has been quietly challenging that idea for decades.

One of the most famous studies on this came from researchers in a paper called “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward.” The findings were surprisingly simple: when children were rewarded for doing something they already enjoyed, their intrinsic motivation often decreased afterward. The reward changed their relationship to the activity itself.

What started as curiosity became performance. “I want to do this” became “What do I get for doing this?” A lot of modern work culture operates exactly like this.

Somewhere along the way, many of us stopped asking whether we actually enjoy the process of our work and started organizing our entire motivation system around external rewards: promotions, raises, titles, LinkedIn announcements, and validation. We tell ourselves we’ll feel fulfilled once we reach the next milestone, only to arrive there and immediately move the goalpost again.

The tricky part is that external rewards aren’t inherently bad. People deserve fair compensation, recognition, and advancement. The problem happens when rewards become the only reason we engage with the work.

When external rewards hinge on performing in a specific way, the activity itself can start to feel transactional. Transactional motivation is incredibly effective in small bursts but terrible at sustaining people over the long term, which is why we still feel weirdly empty afterward.

This is also why a lot of workplace advice feels so hollow. We’ve reduced motivation to productivity hacks like habit stacking, morning routines, and workflow optimization. Colour-code your Notion board, and suddenly you’ll care deeply about your job again.

You can’t life-hack your way into intrinsic motivation if your relationship with your work has become entirely externalized. No amount of productivity systems will fix the feeling of only working for the next carrot dangling in front of you. External rewards can drive behaviour, but they’re short-term fuel, not a long-term source of energy.

So what actually does sustain motivation? It’s things like autonomy, mastery, curiosity, progress, and feeling connected to the work itself.

Motivation tends to come back when:

Ambition is not the enemy, and the goal isn’t to remove rewards entirely. It’s to make sure they aren’t the only thing driving you.

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