In general, however, at a young age foundational skills and opening their minds are more important than any particular direction (though a particular cause/direction can be very motivating). Show people who think academics or hard sciences are the obvious path that all sorts of "soft skills" are actually very valuable even in their presumptive careers, but can also open their eyes to other paths.

Whatever they seem to have closed their mind to without proper consideration, that's what you can target for each individual.

Oh yes! I think that expanding people's imagination of what's possible.. is really a powerful way of creating impact. To me, there's honestly no compliment better than someone telling me that I expanded their imagination of what's possible.. that I've changed them. Especially if I didn't specifically give them advice. I simply motivated them by doing things differently than everyone else, and showing that it's something that anyone [1] can do, not restricted to the arcane domains of some esoteric genius. It's like basically changing their "openness to experience". In general, I do believe that the world would be "better" if more people had higher levels of "openness to experience".

In fact, it's also a powerful antidote against depression (and against people going into narrow high people-to-problems ratio fields where unhappiness tends to be very high). Sometimes I think that "lack of imagination" is a contributing factor to many cases of depression (not a causative one, and there are obviously genetic factors as well). But in my case.. I just really really wish that I knew of a world beyond that of school/academia, and that there are people I can respect who aren't in academia! (sadly, the experience of being in school made me elitist in many ways, which only further increased my neuroticism). But I didn't know that there were alternative paths that I could still be happy with when I was young (which led me to make some poor decisions in college).

There's just so much stress and depression.. so much people who are constantly comparing themselves against each other in some imaginary competition, all for the sake of signalling. So much of it completely unnecessary. And it's frustrating to see it. I think Peter Thiel summarizes it so well here: http://blakemasters.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-4-notes-essay

Just look at high school, which, for Stanford students and the like, was not a model of perfect competition. It probably looked more like extreme asymmetric warfare; it was machine guns versus bows and arrows. No doubt that’s fun for the top students. But then you get to college and the competition amps up. Even more so during grad school. Things in the professional world are often worst of all; at every level, people are just competing with each other to get ahead. This is tricky to talk about. We have a pervasive ideology that intense, perfect competition makes the best world. But in many ways that’s deeply problematic.

One problem with fierce competition is that it’s demoralizing. Top high school students who arrive at elite universities quickly find out that the competitive bar has been raised. But instead of questioning the existence of the bar, they tend to try to compete their way higher. That is costly. Universities deal with this problem in different ways. Princeton deals with it through enormous amounts of alcohol, which presumably helps blunt the edges a bit. Yale blunts the pain through eccentricity by encouraging people to pursue extremely esoteric humanities studies. Harvard—most bizarrely of all—sends its students into the eye of the hurricane. Everyone just tries to compete even more. The rationalization is that it’s actually inspiring to be repeatedly beaten by all these high-caliber people. We should question whether that’s right.

I just think.. if we could maybe convince people to care more about making impact rather than being so obsessive about status... then so much more value can be produced.. And there would be so much less stress, and wasted years.

[1] I'm using the term lightly, but by "anyone" I mean anyone in the top 10% of intelligence, which is still quite a broad range.

Also, by spreading the word about a people who beat the odds, like a neuroscience professor who got into a top grad school with a 2.5 GPA, who is now an assistant professor who is now a rising star).. Seriously.. That type of anecdote is incredibly inspiring for anyone.