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.

The fact that this has been your main flawed-heuristic-to-overcome is probably the source of almost all of our disagreement. My flawed heuristic was very close to the opposite; I was exposed to career-self-help books like "What Color is your Parachute" in my early teens, to the concepts of SMART goals, et cetera. I wouldn't have called it 'comparative advantage', but this was basically my reasoning for not going into physics–I didn't think I was good enough at math to be more than mediocre. I trained my brain to reject goals that weren't specific, measurable, clearly attainable, etc–it wasn't even that I thought about them and chose not to pursue them, but I didn't think they were goals at all. Daydreams, maybe, but goals were things where you could see every step of the way and then walk out and achieve it, without too much uncertainty introduced by the behaviour of other people.

This model helped me–I am quite good at "taskifying" goals, making them specific and measurable and all the rest, and maybe as a consequence, I'm good at doing them. But it limits the goals I can work on, and I've started to notice that people in real life can (sometimes) accomplish goals that start out big and vague and impossible-seeming...even if they only accomplish 1/10th of the goals they attempt, that might still be more total accomplishments than the person who started with easy achievable goals. Thus I should try it.