For many or for one...?

For all of us, hoping to 'nail the big one', or launching out to 'save the whole world', here's a simple advice from Dag Hammarksjold (from his notes, titled Markings)

The “large” context so easily obscures the “small” one. But without that humility and warmth which you must achieve in your relationship to those in whose personal lives you have become involved, you will not be able to do anything for the many. Without this you live in a world of abstractions where your solipsism, your hunger for power, and your destructive impulse will lack their only superior opponent: love. Love, which is the outflowing, without orientation toward an object, of a power freed in self-surrender, but which would remain a sublime form of transhuman-human self-assertion, powerless against what is negative within you, if it were not submitted to the discipline of human nearness and filled with its intimacy. It is better wholeheartedly to make one person good than to “offer oneself for humankind.” For the one who is mature these are not alternatives but self-realizations implicit in the same decision, which mutually support one another. (emphasis added)