I’m 2014 I went to the funeral of my former classmate who had died of cancer. His father, who was a semi-retired biotech scientist, had an idea for how to prime the immune system with patient-specific molecules. I didn’t have a job, so I took on a specific piece of the problem, which was a machine learning model to predict the HLA binding affinity of a candidate vaccine, given a patient’s genetic sequence. Later, a company was started and sold to BioNTech. (I was at a different job, not involved.)
Why am I telling you this? Because no boss has ever suggested a project with even remotely the impact of that one side project, or any one of several others. You will painfully regret the time you spend on somebody else’s career objectives, versus your own ideas to help people.