Worth is a ledger word, and the ledger is honest about the order of things: hardship gets paid up front, while whatever you provide is received by people who mostly never itemise it.
Think of a plumber leaving a warm house on a Sunday evening. Someone else's kitchen stops flooding. Nobody writes it down anywhere.
The value doesn't depend on being acknowledged, which is fortunate, because usually it won't be. What you make and hand over lands somewhere and keeps working long after you have forgotten supplying it. The hardship was simply the price of it existing at all.