You should care if you are improving. Your talents and abilities are the ones being improved. In general, especially outside of school, I think you're right th

You should care if you are improving. Your talents and abilities are the ones being improved. In general, especially outside of school, I think you're right that people don't really care if you're improving. Imagine being a professional essayist writing bad essays - you wouldn't build a readership on the strength of "Well last year I was way worse!" You build a readership, in part, by writing well - not relative to how you used to write, but writing well enough that people want to read. Most things are like this. People generally want quality, they want their doctor to be good, not just better than he was last year. I'd rather have a good doctor who had decayed from great than a bad doctor who had improved from terrible. You want your employees or the people you interact with to be objectively good. Pretending like objective measurements don't matter is an approach for school that is at odds with life.