I had the same reaction to the June bonus - I didn’t get the previous one. In May, I got lucky with several posts that got great traffic.

My thought all month was “How do I keep this going?” and then “Oh, they gave me $500, great”. Then it was “I can’t possibly be in the top 1,000, it wasn’t THAT much traffic!”.

But then I relaxed. I don’t do this for money. Money is nice, but I’m comfortably retired. I enjoy writing, but I don’t want to work all that hard at it now.

Maybe a little bit, though. My competitive spirit still is in me :)