Beware of schemes that claim that your participation in them will help change the world but which come with no money attached. One is only capable of doing great good if one is also capable of doing great evil. More simply: to do a lot of good (not just a teeny tiny bit), one has to be capable of something that affects real world, ergo one has to be powerful. Capability is closely linked with power (and, in a Western society, the closest measure of power is money). If one cannot easily turn his or her work into money, one should question how much capability for real change one has.
But it's not impossible to be powerful without turning your immediate work into money. You might be able to help others make/turn their work into money, which makes me go off on a tangent in my head about an algorithm that could calculate how much power one truly had based on n degrees of separation out from their work.
> You might be able to help others make/turn their work into money
Of course it's possible but it introduces a level of indirectness. Once you have indirectness, it becomes harder to measure your impact. Fields where one's impact is hard to measure tend to attract BS artists who use the ambiguity to their advantage, to claim that they are worth more than they really are.
The algorithm you are thinking of will fail unless it has some way to empirically measure impact, in which case the algorithm would be trivial.
I agree. That's the problem with quotes and mantras: they are a oversimplification of a much more complicated reality. But I find that as long as you don't forget the forest, having some highlighted trees does help you find your way.
