To follow or not to follow?

There are such a group of people, and they are considered the giants.

Sometimes they talk about their experience:

I am not interested in doing research and I never have been. I'm interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing--David Blackwell

Or Feynman discussed when he felt burned out in Cornell. Those discussions I can identify so well.  yet I am not sure if I should follow the steps of those giants. The problem is we are not sure if those people are giants because they take those steps, or if they can afford to take the route because they are giants.

Conditioning is a tricky thing. When conditioning on them being giants, those steps lead to success. Hardly a surprise. That's all the data we observe. The question interesting for me is conditioning on us ordinary people, what will the results be?

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More relevant.

I am thinking about grad school. I ask myself, what is the interesting questions I am really interested in. I list tons of them, both in Econ and in Stats. But they share one thing, they tend to be foundational questions that many giants have worked on.  Should I work on those questions during my grad school years? The impression I got is probably not. Many students told me these are extremely risky things, and I might very well spend five years without getting anywhere. Then I might have to find a boring job to support myself, having very little time if at all, to think about those questions.

yeah, I know, follow my heart. yeah, I know, Einstein discovered relativity while working as a clerk. But I am not Einstein. If I were, I would be care-free. I would just go to any program, work on things I am interested in, whether it is in stats or in econ, or in physics, psychology or medicine. The education will no longer be a confining factor.
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I will continue to read about those giants. But there will always be a sense of distance and skeptisism. Last term, i took a poetry class. In that class, when we analyse one poem, we see the poet's unbounded admiration of a master before him and envision himself being like the master, in aptitude and in attitude towards life. The poem ends in unpleasant realization that he is not that master.