If you have to become someone you don’t like to win, the trophy goes to that person, not you.

A result reached by becoming someone else belongs to that someone else, and you have to keep being them in order to keep it. That is the part rarely considered in advance. Achievement does not sit outside your character, since your character is what produced it, and whoever you had to turn into on the way there is who you will still be afterwards.

Name the two or three things about yourself you will not trade, before you are anywhere near a position where trading one would help. Deciding early is much easier than deciding in the moment.