Being the best "yourself" you can be is definitely a good goal to have.

However, it doesn't really sound like you're trying to be the best "yourself". You're looking around you and see these other people doing stuff. Would you ever have arrived at these conclusions yourself if you had never seen these "successful" people around you?

You're seeing what is theoretically possible if your life was set up in another way i.e. you were a different person. But you're not. All these people you're seeing around you had very specific upbringing, opportunities, genetics etc etc all of which you're not privy to.

Everyone theoretically wants to have had a successful company. Or wants to have had a groundbreaking discovery. Or whatever. But very very few people actually do these things, even if they try hard, mostly those things happen because circumstances in some way set themselves up for these people.

Of course you have to work towards these kind of things to have any chance at them. But that's the thing, those people actually wanted to do those things more than pretty much anything else very early in life. That wasn't because they are just better people, no, it was just because probably their parents or something else instilled some sense of need for specific achievement within them. You didn't get that, so you didn't do these things.

We're entering very philosophical territory. Let me give you some more food for thought.

As perspective, 99% of people never do anything like the stuff you mentioned in their life. And many of these people live a very content and happy life. Are 99% of people wasting their life? Only the ones that aren't content?

What is the end result of, for example, having an amazing startup? How will your life look like, if you do or do not have that, in 10 years? 50 years? 100 years? 1000 years? 10 million years?

Is it of utmost importance that you have had (something like) a successful startup before you die? What if you're one of those 99% that chase it but never reach it? What if you had not "wasted" your life like you say, but still failed at achieving your goal? It's very normal for that to happen.

For me personally, I know that I'm not great at anything much. I have achieved nothing noteworthy. I have no real goals I need to achieve. My only real goal is to be as morally good a person as I can be. I have not a lot of money. I have no family.
Yet I am perfectly happy. I think that it's absolutely irrelevant what exactly I do with my life. I do whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it, and if I don't, that's fine as well. Life does not have a goal state.