Are you proud to be somebody or are you proud that did something?

Pride in who you are is generally a negative.

Pride in what you do is generally a positive.

It is easy to confuse the two. Getting into Harvard does not count as "doing something." Creating Facebook or Microsoft does.

The two are also in a yin-yang relationship. Doing something significant usually transforms you so that you are no longer the same person. It also does not stop you from doing new things. So you cannot be proud of who you are if you are doing things, since you will be reinventing yourself constantly and there will be no stable identity that you can feel proud of.

Conversely, being proud of who you are makes it harder to do anything meaningful.

You can synthesize the two using the idea of honor. Honor is pride in being somebody who does things in a certain way.

Honor is how doers add into their transformational ways of living things that engender trust and faith in others. So if you take pride in being an honest person (an honorable trait) people can rely on you even in some ways even if they cannot predict what exactly you will do.

I'll also ask Ho-Sheng Hsiao to answer and elaborate on the notion of honor. He's studied its history in some depth, in the context of martial arts.