The opposite of studying with a sense of service is chasing success for its own sake. It's like a virus that makes the world a little less livable and gets in the way of your own shot at happiness. It's a total contrast to studying with the right intentions, putting in the kind of effort that actually grows your capacity to love and serve.
What is success-chasing, exactly?
Say the word and you probably picture the "business shark" stereotype: men in expensive suits and women in stilettos striding through the financial district, treating their coworkers as mere rungs on a ladder or obstacles in the way. Hollywood loves that image, but it's pretty far removed from most normal, talented people — and probably from you too, if you're just a student trying to pass your classes. But there are versions of this within reach of totally average talent and ordinary student life. They're more modest-looking but no less dangerous. Call it "everyday" success-chasing: it's a bug that can secretly incubate during your years as a student, and it's a lot easier to catch early. The key is spotting it fast.
Let's break it down: there's the success-chasing of the person who's actually succeeding, but there's also a version for hardworking people who haven't yet achieved the goal. The second version pours out effort and sacrifice, but not always wisely. Its flaw is putting the achievement above everything else, sometimes hiding behind supposedly noble mottos: doing things "right," duty first.
And there's a third kind, for people who keep failing — sometimes badly — at the goals they've set. One of the painful effects of this version is starting to measure your worth (negatively) purely by what you haven't achieved. In their own way, these people are just as success-obsessed, even without seeming to collect any wins, because deep down they're still totally focused on results.
That's the real core of success-chasing: it's not really about the results themselves, but the obsession; the disordered priority placed on chasing them. In other words, you're success-chasing whenever you value the outcome more than the activity itself, when the achievement becomes the dominant motivation and everything else is just a tool to get there. Scoring a goal is a real joy, but something's off if you love the goal more than the game itself and if your playing turns into nothing but a means to that one moment. That's just as true in sports as it is anywhere else, studying included. What if you could get the top grade without putting in the hours? That option exists. It's called cheating, and it's success-chasing's best friend, because it does the dirty work.
The problem with success-chasing
There's nothing wrong with success itself. It's worth pursuing, it's part of what St. Josemaría called "noble ambitions." The real problem is collapsing the whole value of an activity into its result: football into goals, studying into grades.
That's not just wrong; it also robs you of enjoying the thing itself. There's more genuine pleasure in a differential equation than in the grade you get on your calculus exam. It's just that this pleasure is harder to feel: you need hours of work to draw it out, while the moment you get a top grade, the dopamine hit is instant (and gone just as fast). And the hidden pleasure of the differential equation doesn't depend on circumstances the way the grade does: while a single careless slip can turn a perfect score into a failing one, nobody can take away what you actually learned.
Another angle: ask yourself what result you're hoping for from your studies. It's good to study in order to learn. That's the natural outcome when you do it right. The problem is studying for the grade. As everyone knows, a good grade isn't the direct product of studying: it's more of a likely eventual outcome, uncertain in degree, not always showing up in the short term, and only if nothing goes wrong (sometimes only if the stars align). If what you're chasing is learning, not the grade, you might end up with both, over time. That's the dose of success God had in mind for you in this life. But, as Ratzinger put it, "success is not one of the names of God," and it's not wise to pin your hopes on it. In the end, it doesn't matter much: the goal is less than the game, the grade is less than the studying, the paycheck is less than the work.
Studying out of love
The thing that untangles all this is love. Above all, love for the task itself. A well-known Uruguayan writer once said: "Love your art like you love your girlfriend: give it your whole heart." Like any love, a passion for science, art, or study is joyful and demanding all at the same time. Alongside the moments where everything clicks and you're sailing along, there are dry, difficult stretches... but hidden behind the difficulties are new horizons that widen and deepen that love.
That's part of passionately loving the world, which is one of the foundational ideas behind the spirit of Opus Dei. But so that your fascination with differential equations doesn't secretly hide selfishness (so that a passionate love for the world doesn't collapse into love of yourself), you need to discover that behind things, there are people. People are always worth loving; they're interesting, fascinating, and they're what actually fill a human heart.
Which people? Is there really someone hiding behind a differential equation? Who can I love through my work? A parent will answer immediately: my family. Family is an incredibly powerful reason to push through the sacrifices university work always demands. A student in a relationship wants to offer their partner the best version of themselves. But there's a wider circle to serve too: the people you work with and for. Classmates, bosses, clients, suppliers, colleagues, users, patients — and eventually, in one way or another, your whole country. That's the world you love passionately.
If you really want to study out of love, you have to live it as service. That dimension can feel distant to a student, since studying seems to help you more than anyone else. And yet, even now, you can think about training yourself well in order to serve better down the line: studying anatomy properly is a service to your future patients, because getting the wrong bone in an operation doesn't help them. There are a thousand ways to serve along the way: sending your notes to someone who missed class, explaining a topic to someone who's struggling, keeping company with the classmate who's isolated or going through a hard time... Professional volunteer work is a great chance not only to learn, but to build the habit of seeing your career as service to your country.
By contrast, every time I look at my classmates as competitors, I'm injecting myself with a dose of success-chasing. Picture someone who won't lend their notes to a classmate "because they should've taken better notes themselves," or who turns down an invitation to study together because "it'll slow down my own progress," or opportunistically latches onto the top students for group projects. That person is a success-chaser on a student scale. It wouldn't be surprising if, once they graduate and land a good position, that same person doesn't know how — or want — to collaborate, has no real interest in understanding the people on their team, and doesn't contribute to any group efforts.
School and university class rankings create a real problem here. They might be necessary for university applications, jobs, scholarships, or grad school, but they also tend to damage relationships between classmates and pull focus away from loving an activity as service. There's no real camaraderie in a ranking: you can get a 4.0 GPA, an A, or a 90% alongside other people, but you can't be first in the class alongside everyone else. Rankings also create some perverse incentives, like choosing classes or professors because they're easy rather than because of what you'll actually learn. Study as if class rankings didn't exist, and if you can avoid paying attention to them altogether, even better.
At the end of the day, things don't make you happy; people do. High school and university are places for intense community, fertile ground for string friendships. Those companions you suffered through and enjoyed university life with might later become the leaders of the professional, social, or intellectual projects that change your country for the better. Plenty of people meet the person they'll spend the rest of their life and build a family with at school.
Success-chasing damages every one of those possibilities. But when you study out of love and with a sense of service, your heart fills up with people instead.
There are plenty of good human reasons to steer clear of success-chasing, in both work and study. But a Christian has the deepest, most definitive reason of all to orient their effort toward love and turn it into service: their divine filiation, the certainty of being a beloved child of God. Behind whatever you're working on, there's always Someone looking at you with love. Whatever a Christian does, they're working within a divine undertaking that's also their own family business: helping this world, which they love passionately, move toward God.
