There are thousands of people who studied what he studied and have made no impact. This is a terrible criterion by which to choose a career. Believe me, I know

There are thousands of people who studied what he studied and have made no impact. This is a terrible criterion by which to choose a career. Believe me, I know. Once you've chosen a field there's nothing wrong with gravitating toward the most interesting, important, or high-impact problems in that field. Indeed, that's often what you want to do -- though it's hardly a requirement for a happy life. Thank goodness there are superbly competent people in the world who are pleased to do good work as dentists or plumbers or surgeons or accountants, without feeling the constant compulsion to become legendary rock-star accountants. (Indeed, as we've all had occasion to observe, "innovative" accountants who are driven to "make an impact" can be a menace to society.) But I assure you from personal experience that, while curing cancer seems like a more important problem than writing good CRUD apps (though that depends on the CRUD app!), that doesn't mean that you will be happier working on a cure for cancer than working as a programmer. Your happiness will depend more on whether you prefer pipetting to typing, or molecular biology to computer science, or NIH grant proposals to software specs, or academic politics to office politics. Meanwhile, I can hardly blame anybody for not rushing off to play pro football, a game which I kind of like to watch (somewhat in spite of myself) but which I'm given to understand is an exhausting game in which you are slammed to the ground, hard, a few dozen times a week by fast-moving giants who weigh well over 300 pounds. If you're lucky, none of those guys will land on you the way Lawrence Taylor landed on Joe Theismann, your knee cartilage will survive more than a couple of seasons, and the repeated concussions won't cause perceptible brain damage. But, in the meantime, you've got all the personal autonomy of a private in the Marines and you can't even high-five someone on the field without a penalty. I accept the fact that there are people who absolutely love that life, but I don't understand why we assume that everyone should.