Of the factors you put, it seems like peer group is the main one you can influence (which is a large portion of what I've done), and you might be able to affect education, meta-cognition, and humility/lack thereof through deliberate effort. Thus, these are what I care about for the purposes of thinking about my own plans, as opposed to having interesting conversations about people who do cool things, or being in a job where you try to predict who will do cool things so you can hire them. In that case, the value of noticing and understanding factors beyond the individual's control is helpful.

But learning about the factors that drive success in general is a sort of education, and one that I've found to have been helpful for my own personal development (though I recognize that my introspection may be faulty, and that my own situation may not generalize).

In particular, it's relevant to understanding one's comparative advantage. For example, I recently learned that my fluid intelligence lower than that of the average person in my peer groups, and that my ability to develop crystalized intelligence is probably higher than that of the average person in my peer groups. This suggests that I should work in a field where crystalized intelligence is more important to success than fluid intelligence is.

I value a world that contains interesting conversations, beautiful things, a society with helpful traditions and rituals, and people who do useful things for sane reasons. All else being equal, I value fewer people dying. I value less total pain. I value a society with mechanisms that allow it to change and progress in useful ways.

Would you describe yourself as basically utilitarian in philosophical outlook? The degree to which you're cause agnostic makes a difference in what's optimal.

On a personal level, I want to do something important and relevant. I think this is a basic human need.

"I think that's partly what interests me in people, that we don't just wish to feed and sleep and reproduce then die like cows or sheep. Even if they're gangsters, they seem to want to tell themselves they're good gangsters and they're loyal gangsters, they've fulfilled their 'gangstership' well. We do seem to have this moral sense, however it's applied, whatever we think. We don't seem satisfied, unless we can tell ourselves by some criteria that we have done it well and we haven't wasted it and we've contributed well. So that is one of the things, I think, that distinguishes human beings, as far as I can see." — Kazuo Ishiguro

I think a big part of "having ambitions" (as opposed to "being ambitious") is the HMPOR concept of "responsability." You look at a situation and think "this needs to change, and to make it change, this needs to be done." And you go out and try things until the change happens. I didn't used to think like this at all. Now I do a bit more, even if I don't always act accordingly.

To clarify where I'm coming from, in the past, I placed too much emphasis on far mode thinking about how to make the world a better place in the abstract, as opposed to focusing on locally optimizing for personal growth, which would help me make the world a better place in the long run. I think that a good heuristic is to focus on what one can do best in the short-run, rather than focusing on what seems most important in the abstract. It's often the case that the way in which one ends up having the most impact is different from what one would have imagined at the outset.

I recognize that my prior failure mode may not be relevant to your situation – just raising it as a point for consideration.

Oh! That's what he's talking about! I totally know that feeling. I've even had it with respect to math and science. Is this actually what romantic passion feels like to most people?

His analogy with romantic passion is imperfect — I would guess that more than anything else, he was trying to highlight the intensity of the emotion involved (in order to contrast it with popular conceptions of mathematical activity). Religious experience may be as close or closer. But religious experience probably doesn't come with the same obsessive "drive" that romantic passion does.

Here is another quotation of his that might clarify what he was trying to say:

The year 1955 marked a critical departure in my work in mathematics: that of my passage from "analysis" to "geometry". I well recall the power of my emotional response ( very subjective naturally); it was as if I'd fled the harsh arid steppes to find myself suddenly transported to a kind of "promised land" of superabundant richness, multiplying out to infinity wherever I placed my hand in it, either to search or to gather... This impression, of overwhelming riches has continued to be confirmed and grow in substance and depth down to the present day. The phrase "superabundant richness" has this nuance: it refers to the situation in which the impressions and sensations raised in us through encounter with something whose splendor, grandeur or beauty are out of the ordinary, are so great as to totally submerge us, to the point that the urge to express whatever we are feeling is obliterated.