Your examples sound familiar to me too, but after rereading your comment and mine, maybe it all can be generalized in a different way. Namely, that internal motivation leads to a low level of effort: reading some textbooks now and then, solving some exercises, producing some small things. It still feels a bit like staying in place. Whereas it takes external motivation to actually move forward with math, or art, or whatever—to spend lots of effort and try to raise my level every day. That’s how it feels for me. Maybe some people can do it without external motivation, or maybe they lucked into getting external motivation in the right way, I don’t know.
Your examples sound familiar to me too, but after rereading your comment and mine, maybe it all can be generalized in a different way. Namely, that internal motivation leads to a low level of effort: reading some textbooks now and then, solving some exercises, producing some small things. It still feels a bit like staying in place. Whereas it takes external motivation to actually move forward with math, or art, or whatever—to spend lots of effort and try to raise my level every day. That’s how it feels for me. Maybe some people can do it without external motivation, or maybe they lucked into getting external motivation in the right way, I don’t know.