Growth-contingent worth has no rest state
Achievement-contingent worth at least lets you arrive. Tie your worth to growth instead, and you've built a machine that can never be finished.
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Everyone knows the trap of hanging your worth on achievement: you're only as good as the last result, and the goalposts move the moment you reach them. The usual prescription is to swap it for something gentler — worth tied to growth, to effort, to becoming rather than arriving.
The quieter trap
But growth-contingent worth is the more totalizing of the two, precisely because it sounds like the cure. Achievement at least has arrivals — moments, however brief, where the thing is done and you're allowed to stop. Growth has none. There is no version of "improving" that completes.
A standard you can satisfy will eventually let you rest. A standard defined as motion never will.
So the person who has "fixed" their achievement-contingent worth by making it about growth has often just built a subtler cage: one with no walls to push against and no exit, because the requirement is no longer a result but a direction you must never stop moving in.
The way out isn't a better contingency. It's noticing that worth was never the thing being measured in the first place — and letting direction, not worth, be the thing you audit.