Why Rewards Can Kill Your Motivation

Offering a prize for something you already love to do can actually make you want to do it less. This is called the overjustification effect, where external rewards crowd out your natural passion.

When you perform an activity just for the joy of it, your brain labels the task as rewarding in itself. However, introducing money or trophies causes a cognitive shift where you start to view the work as a means to an end. Once the reward is taken away, your brain no longer sees a reason to continue because the intrinsic spark was replaced by a transaction. This helps explain why paying children to read or hobbyists to play can sometimes drain their genuine enthusiasm.