Unfortunately, even in your "dangerous mistake" question, you're still asking for too general an answer. I haven't currently found any, that I think would work as a general rule of thumb. The closest might be to remember that how you think you're impacting other people, and how you're actually impacting them, are not always the same thing.

>but basically you only have so much time in a lifetime so if you spend the whole thing until you're dead and failed that's the extreme

Who cares what you did, at that point? You won't even be around to define success and failure, anymore. So defining success and failure, at that point, doesn't really seem to be a meaningful thing to do, if that makes any sense. I'd maybe set my goals more short/intermediate term.

What is success? What is failure? What is wasting time?