I like to think what we value drives our day to day actions. Often, the rewards for those actions are along another dimension and independent of your values.

If we are lucky enough to line up our values and the rewards we get for our actions, that might be a happy life :).

In this case, I speculate the guy wanted to build something fun, the reward came in $, so there is angst of values driving the action vs the reward of the action. It's great he is so aware of it though.

In a path dependent process like life, I feel a good way to measure yourself is % increase over your former self, along any dimension and quantification you see fit.