When we are "driven" to succeed in this world, it is always to arrive at some point wherein we will no longer feel as though something is missing in us. All such drives in us are doomed at the outset. Here's why.
These compulsive states of self are the unconscious expression of the opposites within us where the insufficient self we think ourselves to be projects a time and place where we won't be this same self anymore. This divided state of self produces conflict, frustration, struggle, and ultimately disappointment, because no opposite can resolve itself.
On the other hand, when it is the love of something that motivates us and moves us, that love - for whatever the endeavor may be - is its own reward in the moment. This is the real definition of success. Here there is no future and no past to escape. And best of all, love is the perfect self-purifier, which means each action taken under its direction elevates the one so directed.
What each of us must do, if we are ever to be truly successful human beings, is learn to ask what the "results" are that we are seeking. Being spiritually asleep as we are, when a certain thought passes through our mind, along with a certain emotional content and image, we believe that the picture we have in our mind is what we really want. But the truth is that we have all had one reward after another in obtaining what we imagined, yet we are still hungry for more.
If this much begins to get clear - that we live from a nature that is a bottomless basket - and we see the results of this nature on the world around us, then we begin to question the "results" it seeks. We see that these results are not only unattainable but untenable as well. As we drop the drives that belong to our highly conditioned nature, we gradually discover that the result we wanted all along was there all along - to be our own person, and to have our own life, free of the insanity of ambitious competition and all the rest. Then we have succeeded. And best of all, the Truth that makes this possible then sees to it that we have the rest of what we need.
