appreciating unhappiness?

I've never read Faust but I happened to read a passage written by someone who has read it.  (Which reminds me that you don't necessarily have to read Hemingway to get a Hemingway-ish insight -- because he's everywhere.  It sounds lazy and arrogant, but it's probably sort of like having soup with some beef extract instead of beef itself.  ...Which are, after all, two very different things.  And the chewing is what counts if I want to grow my brain muscle.  But I guess it's still an efficient way of getting nutrients as long as my soup isn't water?)

Anyway, according to her, Faust is great in that he puts in a lot of effort to learn and get what he wants, but lacks a sense of appreciation.  She was against his arrogant idea that anything could be achieved through effort.  "I think Faust should appreciate who he is and what he has before desiring to improve himself and his life."  (You can read the original post here)

She's absolutely right.  But I think it's very difficult to be happy with what you have (or who you are) AND desire to improve yourself at the same time.  At least I've found it very difficult.  It's this sense of unsatisfaction or frustration that motivates me.  A lot of energy is required to progress, and I kind of believe that the most negative feelings can be the most powerful drive.  I've read somewhere that in many cases, it's the fear of failure rather than the image of success that makes humans work.

Personally, I don't think I'll ever write if I were completely full of happiness.  I enjoy writing by nature, but it's also similar to masturbation, if that doesn't sound too weird.  There are some needs inside of me that need to be met, and I write to fill in that little hole.  Though it might sound kind of sad and maybe narsicistic when I write it down like this.

There's a story of a fisherman in a tiny island who would wander around from bar to bar talking about how he had this hole in his heart. He said he couldn't sleep -- he would just lie there in bed because of this hole. The community got together and found the guy a log. The guy had never carved a thing before in his life and it took him five years but he carved a totem pole.  He needed to make it just so he could sleep.

Going back to Faust and his idea that anything can be achieved through effort, I know you can't achieve everything, but throughout my life so far, I've *almost* always had something on my mind that I really wanted, and that has been my locomotive.  The existence of an unaccomplished goal does inevitably make me unsatisfied to some extent (almost by definition), and by the time (or shortly after) I get what I want, I have a new goal in mind that sends me back to where I was, but that, in a sense, is what makes me who I am.

I've started to realize I have to learn to be happy not when I actually reach my goal but also when I'm still on my way, because it's an infinite cycle.  To me, however, that sort of means accepting the fact that I am, in fact, unhappy -- that I don't have to be completely happy.  And I hope that I can learn to appreciate things I'm not exactly happy with.  But am I contradicting myself again?