There was a decent article last week from SmartMoney.com entitled Reaching the $5 Million Club Takes an Open Mind. It emphasizes a fact that I’ve always strongly believed: Being extremely financially successful requires drive and ambition more so than lucky stock picks.

Surprisingly, today’s very rich say that money itself wasn’t much of a motivator. Once you’ve got food in your belly and a big-screen TV, the mere prospect of more Benjamins isn’t enough to get you leaping out of bed at 5 a.m. Rather, rich folks often make their fortunes after they make up their minds to solve a problem or do something better than it’s been done before.

Sure, the pursuit of money will make you get to your job on time and do enough to keep that job, but it often won’t motivate you to do more than that. And some people are perfectly happy with that level of success, which is fine. But the people who go on to even higher levels of success are often driven by a need to do more than the same daily routine.

Personally, I found I always had somewhat of a lack of ambition on my career, partially because I didn’t have a specific focus of what I wanted to be. Now that I’m working at a small company who is going through a nice period of growth, I suddenly have the urge to do even more. I spend most of my free time at work researching ways to make things around here more efficient, or looking for new ideas that could make us grow even faster.

This is also what I believe, or hope, is a direct result of education. I was very tempted to join the job force after four years of undergraduate education. Instead, I stayed on for another two and a half years for a master’s degree. I hope that, besides the salary benefits, this will provide me with more of an opportunity to go further in my career than I would have had with just a bachelor’s degree.

As shameless as this might be, I think of my wife as a great example of an incredibly driven and ambitious person. She graduated with a degree in fine art, without really a clue of what she wanted to pursue after graduation. She took a few different jobs while I was in graduate school (including a graphic designer, payroll supervisor, and a job at a lender service), still trying to decide what she wanted to make a career out of. Then, late last year, she realized a career in business and consulting would be perfect.

She spent the last few months job searching, turning down offers which would only have paid the bills, until she applied for a job as an assistant in a large company in downtown Boston. The interviewers were so impressed with her determination that they instead hired her as an operations manager.

With all the financial advice we are bombarded with each day, it’s essential to remember that all the index funds and IRA’s in the world pale in importance to the success you afford yourself through your career.