The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits is a great book on this topic.
It makes a great argument that, unfortunately, merit based admission to elite universities does nothing to increase equality of opportunity because the rich are so much better at training and educating their children.
The upside is that people are forced to earn their privilege with hard work and study, rather than having it handed to them at birth. The downside is that there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, privilege begets more work, which begets more material wealth, which begets yet harder work / overachieving children.
Scratch your own itch. Solving a problem you have will motivate you, but more importantly it’s the only way to be able to navigate through a problem space.
Without being the customer you will have so much trouble coming up with solutions to problems people are willing to pay to solve.