Separating Worth From Productivity Without Losing Drive

Happy Monday, Reader,

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been circling around this idea of identity, how easily it fuses to output, and how fragile things become when it does. If you’ve felt unsettled reading these emails, that makes sense. This is one of those topics that doesn’t resolve cleanly. It shifts as you look at it.

And I don’t want to rush past that discomfort.

There’s a particular fear that tends to surface at this point, even if we don’t name it outright. It shows up as a tightening in the chest more than as a clear thought. The fear isn’t really about writing itself. It’s about momentum.

If worth loosens its grip on productivity, what keeps things moving?
What keeps the work from dissolving into good intentions and unfinished drafts?

That question haunted me for a long time, long before I ever thought of it in writing terms.

Part of the reason it haunted me is because this belief doesn’t start in adulthood. It doesn’t begin with deadlines or word counts or publishing goals. It starts much earlier than that, in ways so normal we barely question them.

From the moment we enter the world, we are measured. Weight. Length. Apgar scores. Milestones. Sitting up. Walking. Talking. Performing on schedule. Performing well.

As children, we absorb this quietly. We learn that doing things at the right time, in the right way, earns approval. We learn that progress is visible, that it can be tracked, compared, praised. Before we have language for identity, we have language for performance.

And then, almost as soon as we can speak in full sentences, we’re asked a strange question.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

It sounds innocent. It’s treated as curiosity. But underneath it sits an assumption we carry for decades. That who you are will eventually be defined by what you produce. By what you offer. By how you contribute. It’s a productivity question disguised as imagination.

No one asks a child how they want to move through the world. Or what values they want to live by. Or what kind of presence they want to be. The focus is always outward, future-facing, measurable.

So it makes sense that productivity becomes the easiest stand-in for worth. It’s familiar. It’s reinforced. It’s rewarded. And by the time we reach adulthood, it feels natural to judge ourselves by what we can point to.

I didn’t recognize this at the time, but it was already at work when I was in nursing school.

I cared deeply about what I was doing. I wasn’t drifting. I wasn’t half-hearted. Medicine fascinated me. Being on the hospital floor felt alive in a way few other things ever have. I could adapt to what was happening in front of me. I could respond. I could learn by watching, by doing, by adjusting in real time. I felt competent in my body, not just in my head.

Then I’d sit in a classroom.

Same person. Same desire. Same work ethic. And suddenly everything slowed down in the worst way. Information didn’t move through me. It piled up. Exams asked me to perform understanding in a format that felt disconnected from how understanding actually formed for me. I wasn’t confused so much as blocked, like there was a bottleneck between knowing and demonstrating that knowing.

What mattered over time wasn’t the mismatch itself. It was what happened internally because of it.

The longer I struggled to produce the kind of output that counted, the more my sense of worth started attaching itself to those measurements. Grades became shorthand. They stopped being feedback and started feeling like verdicts. I knew I cared. I knew I was trying. None of that showed up on a transcript.

So I did what most people do in that situation. I assumed the problem was me.

That’s the moment writers recognize, even if the context is different.

Productivity is easy to point to. It’s visible. Pages written. Days in a row. Drafts finished. Those numbers feel solid in a way internal experience never does. Over time, they take on weight they were never meant to carry.

At some point, productivity stops being information and starts becoming identity. When things are moving, you feel grounded. When they slow down, something in you feels threatened. That threat isn’t about the work. It’s about what the slowdown seems to say about you.

I didn’t stop caring in nursing school. If anything, I cared too much. But when the only acceptable proof of competence was performance in a narrow format, my internal narrative began to erode. The stall wasn’t academic. It was existential.

That’s why separating worth from productivity feels destabilizing at first. Productivity has been doing double duty for a long time. It’s been progress and proof, effort and identity, all wrapped together. Pulling those threads apart can feel like removing a support beam, even when that beam is already cracked.

What I learned, slowly and painfully, is that drive doesn’t disappear when productivity stops being the judge. It just stops being fueled by fear.

Fear creates motion, but it also creates collapse. I didn’t burn out because I lacked ambition. I burned out because ambition was carrying more than it should have been asked to carry.

There was another current underneath everything, quieter and harder to name. A sense of alignment when I was doing work that matched how I actually move through the world. Curiosity. Adaptability. Care. Those things were present whether or not I was producing the right kind of output. They didn’t disappear when I stalled. They were still there, waiting to be recognized.

That recognition came much later, long after I stopped measuring myself by transcripts and timelines. It came when I started paying attention to what stayed consistent even when results didn’t.

That’s where values live.

Values aren’t aspirations. They’re patterns. They show up in how you pay attention, what you protect, what exhausts you, what feels meaningful even when nothing tangible comes out of it.

When productivity drops, values don’t vanish. When a draft stalls, values don’t evaporate. They explain why you care in the first place, even when caring feels inconvenient.

This week, I want you to spend some time with that idea, without trying to turn it into a fix.

Take the values sheet I shared with you. Read through it slowly. Let some of the words irritate you. Let others feel obvious. Let a few surprise you.

Choose the values that already show up in how you move through the world, especially when things aren’t going well.

You’re not building a future self here. You’re noticing a present one.

Next week, we’ll talk about what happens when those values anchor your identity as a writer, and how that changes your relationship with bad drafts and stalled projects. For now, just notice what happens when productivity loosens its grip on who you think you are.

See you next week,

P.S. If you want to share what you noticed while looking at the values list, you can hit reply. There’s no expectation, just curiosity.

P.P.S. I want to show you what this looks like in real life, not as a theory, but as a practice.

When I did this exercise for myself, I didn’t ask which values sounded admirable. I asked which ones kept showing up, even when things weren’t going well.

Authenticity is one of mine. It means I don’t contort myself to fit someone else’s idea of who I should be. In writing, that shows up as telling the truth I see, even when it’s messy, even when it doesn’t land cleanly the first time. A draft can be rough without that roughness meaning anything about my worth.

Compassion is another. I extend it outward, but I also extend it inward. When I miss a day, or a week, or stall in the middle of a project, compassion keeps me from turning that pause into a character flaw. It keeps me grounded. It keeps me human.

Contentment matters to me in a way that surprised me when I named it. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to grow. It means I’m at peace with who I am while I’m growing. If everything ended today, I could live with the person I’ve been. That changes how much pressure I put on my output to justify my existence.

Courage shows up when I keep writing even when I’m unsure, not because fear disappears, but because fear isn’t the authority anymore. Creativity and curiosity work together for me. They remind me that a bad writing day can still be a meaningful one, that exploration counts even when it doesn’t produce pages.

Dignity, fairness, and ethics are values I carry everywhere, including onto the page. They shape how I treat my own work. They shape how I talk to myself about it. I don’t berate myself into productivity. I don’t strip myself of dignity because something didn’t come together the way I hoped.

And family, forgiveness, and compassion are the values that catch me when I falter. They remind me that I belong somewhere regardless of what I’ve produced. That belonging makes it possible to return to the work without fear driving the process.

This is what I mean when I say my identity isn’t built on output. My writing expresses my values, but it doesn’t determine whether those values exist. They’re already there. They hold steady when drafts don’t.

That’s the kind of foundation we’ll talk about next week.