one kind sent rockets and recollected them, made robots run and jump. The other kind, shrank blog posts to 140 characters, or added a timeout to short messages, removed the thumb down button, and called them a new feature.
Today, we still remember the names of da Vinci, Tesla, Turing, not because they had a successful family ...
I just want to keep the dream I had as a kid.
So you're living based on how you will be remembered by strangers? That sounds incredibly unfulfilling and doesn't sound like a good way to live. In a few hundred more years almost no one will remember the names of those people either.
>da Vinci, Tesla, Turing
It's incredibly safe to say that you are not going to be as successful as these people. Almost no one achieves this much success in the sciences. At most you will probably advance your field by a few useful steps and then be personally forgotten about except in research paper footnotes.
>not because they had a successful family
You know who cares about you and remembers you more significantly than as a research footnote? Your family.
>I just want to keep the dream I had as a kid
Man, don't we all.
"I" am the best witness to my existence. Not the person giving my eulogy. Who are you to tell someone how to define what "fulfilling" means to them?
Pursue your own balance of values with passion, and allow others to be meaningfully different from you. Their desires don't diminish yours.
I can live with failing. I can't live with not trying.