Agreed. In my own mind, I often compare it to the flywheel concept in a book I read a few years ago about Amazon's business principles. They talk about how starting a business program is like pushing a flywheel. It takes immense energy to overcome inertia for very small returns at the beginning, but the more you push, the easier it gets and the faster it goes, until eventually momentum takes over and it's almost spinning freely. At that point, it takes relatively little effort to keep it going.
I think that building an audience for a blogger is also like pushing a flywheel, but maybe there's something demotivational about the rewards dynamic here that tends to discourage people from exerting the effort it takes to get the thing spinning freely. Somehow, seeing those numbers at the bottom of the post seems to shift the mind to thinking about rewards instead of readers. Which is ironic, because in the long run, it's having readers that bring the rewards.
Is that book called From Good to Great?
No. That was a good book, too, but I remember the flywheel concept from The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company. I posted a book review of it on Steem in 3 parts back in 2016: