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William James (1890: 310) gave a very early, if not the earliest, definition of self-esteem in the mode of a formula:

pretensions/success = self-esteem

Based on this formula, we form our self-esteem in a particular area of our life or domain (e.g. learning a language) based on how highly we value it or aim at succeeding in it. If a student has strong aspirations (i.e. pretensions) to, for example, be good at speaking English, then, because he or she thinks that this is important, success or failure in this endeavour affects his or her self-esteem more strongly in this particular domain.

While self-concept is what we believe about our self, self-esteem involves an evaluation – positive or negative – of what makes up our theory of our self. In other words, self-esteem is a subjective evaluation of one’s worth (Orth & Robins 2014: 381). Rubio (2014: 42) compares the difference between self-concept and self-esteem using the metaphor of a picture: “Self-esteem would correspond to the resulting evaluation of the picture; while the picture would be the self-concept.” The keyword when it comes to differentiating the two terms here again is “evaluation.”