care about my work enough to want to get better

The problem with work that's 'just a job' is that you'll never be as good at it as at work that really excites you, where you really want to achieve something not just because your team or boss expects it but because you're excited about what it will do for the world.

If you're doing your work for yourself (or for someone else meaningful to you), then getting better at your work immediately benefits you. If you're doing your work for someone else, there's a principal-agent problem: getting better at your work mostly benefits that person's goals.

As Paul Graham said, you should be working on the top idea in your mind: the idea that you can't stop thinking about even when you're in the shower.

I had this in college and parts of grad school: I wanted to become a 'smart person', generically and specifically in that I was really curious about the new ideas at the intersection of CS and psychology and philosophy and AI and I really wanted to understand them and the world better. So doing work was in service of that, reading books was in service of that, and even reading internet posts about productivity was in service of that.

As of now (Feb 8 2020), there's nothing about my job that makes me obsess in my spare time about 'how to be a better software engineer'. To the extent I am getting better, it's through osmosis, not through deliberate practice. And I haven't thought very much at all about math, the future of AI, social implications and impactful applications of AI. I'm not growing. And that's what's really scary.