Ever wondered why you stopped pursuing the job you wanted as a kid? Here’s the science behind it, and how to make work and downtime feel fun again
Somewhere between the school run and the mortgage, most of us swapped the thing we loved for the thing that pays. Maybe it happened even earlier because some teacher or relative talked us out of pursuing what they saw as a pipedream. Here’s why so many people don’t fight for their childhood aspirations and how to get some of them back.
Try this before you read on. Write down three things you loved doing as a young child or teen. Not necessarily things you were good at. Things you’d do for fun and joy for free.
Got your list? Now ask a harder question. Would you still do any of them with no paycheque or revenues, no praise and no gold star attached?
That gap, between what we loved and what we’d still do for nothing, is what this article is about.
The carrot, the stick and the kid who needed neither
In the early 1970s, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan built a framework called Self-Determination Theory. It explains a lot about adult misery and regrets. The idea is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
As addiction psychiatrist and Brown University professor Jud Brewer puts it in his Medium piece, intrinsic motivation is when the activity is its own reward. You do the thing because doing it feels good. Extrinsic motivation is when the reward sits outside the activity, like a paycheque, a grade, or a gold star. Carrots and sticks are extrinsic. Building a den for the sheer joy of it is intrinsic.
Children are basically walking intrinsic-motivation machines. Nobody has to bribe a five-year-old to investigate a puddle. As Brewer explains on his website, Dr Jud, being curious is its own reward. It feels good, and it doesn’t run out because it doesn’t depend on anything external. You never see a toddler get bored with being curious.
So, what happened to us?
The slow extrinsic takeover. That’s the mechanism to blame. It’s less a single dramatic betrayal and more a thousand small substitutions. Brewer’s own research area, the habit loop, offers a clue. Every habit runs on the same three-part loop: a trigger, a behaviour, and a reward. Over time, it becomes automatic.
Somewhere around report cards, the reward attached to drawing or building or asking endless questions got quietly swapped. Drawing stopped being rewarding because it felt good. It became rewarding because it earned praise, then a grade, then, if you were talented, a comment like “you should really monetise this.”
As Brewer put it in an interview on the Plant Yourself podcast, extrinsic rewards are fragile. Take the carrot away, and the behaviour usually goes with it. Intrinsic rewards don’t have that problem. They’re always available, so there’s no external tank that can run dry.
This explains a common adult pattern. The person who was “great at piano” as a kid hasn’t touched a keyboard since the recitals stopped. Meanwhile, someone else is still doodling in meetings thirty years later, for no reason at all.
Nobody sits you down and steals your intrinsic motivation on purpose. School, then a career ladder, then a mortgage, keep offering you a bigger carrot every time you get good at something. Carrots are easier to chase than the fuzzy feeling of “this is fun.” Over enough years, most of us stop noticing we’ve swapped one reward for the other.
Is it too late to bring the dream job back?
Short answer: no. And the “too late” feeling is worth questioning rather than obeying.
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation aren’t strictly either/or. Most adult work is a blend. The goal isn’t to turn your career into one long passion project. It’s to notice where the balance has tipped too far towards “have to,” and nudge it back.
Two things make this genuinely doable, not just an inspirational-poster slogan.
1. Awareness drives change, not willpower. Brewer’s clinical work on habits, built from years of treating addiction, found that people can update the reward value they’ve assigned to a behaviour. They do this simply by paying attention. This feeds the brain new information and resets the order of importance of rewards over time. Translated in an addiction context: if you notice, mid-task, how a piece of work actually feels, rather than how it looks on LinkedIn, you start spotting which activities still have real juice left in them.
2. You don’t need a full career change. You need an intrinsic reward that feeds your joy. A neuroscience review of intrinsic motivation notes that adults still take up new hobbies with no extrinsic reward attached. That circuitry never disappears. It just gets outcompeted. You don’t need to quit your job. You just need to give the old circuitry some dedication and somewhere to run.
So, it’s not too late. The kid who loved building things isn’t gone. They’ve just been stuck chasing carrots for so long that they forgot the building itself was ever the point.
Which sideline job could make you feel like being nine again?
Not every freelance job or side business reconnects you with that childhood feeling. Plenty are just extrinsic motivation with worse hours. Drop shipping a product you don’t care about isn’t “following your passion.” It’s a second job with extra spreadsheets.
But some kinds of side work reliably tap the same reward circuitry that made bike rides and mud pies so compelling back in the day:
Making a physical thing exist that didn’t before
Woodworking, ceramics, baking for a farmers’ market, restoring old furniture. Building tangible objects mirrors the den-building, Lego-stacking loop from childhood. The money is a nice bonus, but rarely the reason people keep going.
Teaching or coaching something you’d happily explain for free
Tutoring, coaching a youth sport, running a small workshop. Explaining something you understand well taps the same curiosity circuit, just running in reverse.
Anything built around a puzzle
Freelance coding for the problem itself, puzzle-hunt design, escape room building, and bookkeeping for people who genuinely enjoy a balanced ledger. If you lost track of time doing logic puzzles as a child, this is the grown-up version.
Guiding people through a place or story you love
Tour guiding, local history walks, a small travel-planning business. Roaming your neighbourhood as a kid and mapping a city as an adult are closer cousins than they look.
Performing, even on a small scale
Amateur performances could cover a band playing three pub gigs a year, an open mic night or joining a community theatre. Almost nobody makes real money here, which is rather the point.
Notice the pattern. None of these gets chosen because they scale, or because they’re “in-demand skills.”
You just need to choose that thing you love to do because the activity survives the removal of the money. That’s the real test.
Would you keep doing it if the money stopped? If yes, you’ve found something worth protecting, whether or not it ever becomes your main income.
The one-question check-in
You don’t need a five-year plan to start rebalancing this. Next time you sit down to work, whether it’s your main job or a side hustle, ask the nine-year-old’s question. Would I do this if nobody was watching or paying?
Some days the honest answer is no, and that’s fine. Not everything needs to be a calling. Some things are just how the mortgage gets paid. But if the answer is always no, across everything, that’s not a career problem you can solve with a better job title. It’s a sign the reward circuitry that used to run on its own is sitting dormant, waiting for a reason to reboot.
The good news, according to the actual neuroscience, is that this circuitry doesn’t wear out. It doesn’t need rebuilding from scratch. It just needs something to do again.