I meant work like "being at a job" rather rather than work like "effort". Although I should say that some personal coding sessions feel like zero effort and produce great code.

To the difference is doing things you don’t want to do to feed your belly versus doing things you don’t want to do to feed your soul (theres also ding things you want to do for both reasons).

An analogy would be training for an amateur athletic event. Marketing a personal project and running at 5am in winter are showing up at the office in pursuit of a passion.

Not that there’s anything wrong with not wanting to do it.