Generally, the highest impact of any individual is mostly minior (of course the collective actions matter, but you are mostly bound to be a tiny gear in massive cultural processes that are nearly out of our control). To increase impact, you need to increase ~net worth. The most effective way of doing that is to ascend existing hierarchies even though that is massively biased by nepotism, looks and imperfect evaluation abilities; but, hey, that's the best we can get out of a system of distributed responsibilities and provided that all alternatives seem to diverge into authoritarianism. It is excessively rare to find alternative ways of having an impact.

If nobody tried, changes would of course occur much less often. So there is that.