Seems to me that study well and get a good job is exactly the same as don't study bad and don't get a bad job, and don't stop studying and working, which is easy to say and easy to interpret; while be unique has some 'emergent properties'. Now... setting the clock for five minutes...
Encouraging someone to be agenty can be effectively done by putting them in charge of communal efforts. It's not enough to bear some (heroic) responsibility yourself, you have to learn to nurture the tiniest sprouts of initiative of people around you. Even if they want to work in a newspaper.
Among other things, it teaches you to 1) never drop the ball, 2) recognize the vaguest idea as one that has potential - or doesn't, but as the main thing is 1), you will stick your neck out and go with it. Even if it sounds irrational. And when it fails, you must - because there's nobody else to do it, because if you lose a person, nobody's coming in their place - say, we shall try it a different way. Then comes a session of 'really hard thinking', then you give up, then they call you and say something like, of course, this is what I did wrong...
And that doesn't mean you can become great at something, just that you'll keep trying to.
Pratchett's lecture at Trinity
For a long time, I've been dubious about "rationality is winning". While it protects against one dangerous line of thought (I was right! It's just that the universe didn't cooperate), it fails to mention a time scale-- sometimes you lose before you win. And sometimes you wander around for a while with no apparent purpose, and then you find something unlikely and valuable.
Pratchett's lecture includes a description of his early life, and I don't think any rational person or any rational parent would have seen his early life as any sort of sensible goal-seeking, or likely to lead to winning in any sense.
Pratchett was a fairly bad student, though he did better when he had less competition. He read all the bound volumes of Punch (the major British satirical magazine), and learned from that classic.
He became a reporter for a local newspaper, a job with modest status and low salary. (In one of his novels, he mentions the voracious appetite of a newspaper-- it's got to have news every day. Somehow, this seemed more intensely true than the large number of other sensible things he said in his books. Looks like I was on to something.)
It seems to me that LW-style rationality would have had him working on being a better student and looking for ways to make more money early on, and he probably wouldn't have written Discworld.
On the other hand, Eliezer is doing quite well, and on yet another and possibly gripping hand, I doubt that going for increasing the probability of success would have started with "think really hard about existential risks".