When I began college my carreer plan was this Bill Gates "be rich or powerful, than do good for the world" path. Well, it doesn't work like that. Actually, now

When I began college my carreer plan was this Bill Gates "be rich or powerful, than do good for the world" path. Well, it doesn't work like that. Actually, now I see this as kind of selfish, a pretentious delusion of self-importance. When I thought like this I wanted to be a hero, not make the world a better place. I realized my mistake in time, changed my major, started a carreer on the non-profit sector and I was cool with doing something adjuvant as part of something that was trying to do some good. But that doesn't mean the more important conclusion of the OP, that is "Just because optimising Javascript isn’t making the world a better place right this second doesn’t mean you’re destined to a life of misanthropic selfishness" is wrong. This has something to do with Steve Jobs connecting dots, with Gandhi being a lawyer before being Mahatma, with Muhammad Yunus being a humble professor of Economics in his native country before a Nobel laureate (Peace Nobel prize, not Economics). I just quit my job on a non-profit startup, after 8 years in the field, and now I am a founder of a regular, for-profit startup. This is not my final carreer path, this is teaching me a lot about disrupting things. I mean, A LOT. The paradigm shift emerging through startups is very powerful. On a final note, all this "I want to change the world" mantra that I often listen applied to tech startups is, 99% of the times, BS. Facebook indeed changed the world. For better? Not necessarily. Twitter did? Not in my opinion. "But what about the Arab Spring??". Listen, people, empowered by technology change the world. So you may say that technology change the world. Not brands. SMS technology is changing the world in many ways all over Africa, internet changed the world, not Twitte, or Facebook. Some startups disrupted some technology use so strongly, that they became monopolists in their use. But still, don't confuse technology and brands. Summarizing, optimizing Javascript may not be making the world a better place right this second, but if you are improving your knowledge, and - another good advice from OP - don't let yourself be defined by your job and is trying hard to create a big picture for yourself, than optimizing Javascript may be a very important dot that you will connect to make a difference in the future.