I’d say Justin’s advice is pretty sound. I don’t think you need to be an authority figure per se, but I think you do need to become rapidly proficient, and the quickest way to do that is specialize, like he has mentioned.
I’d also add though, pick something that will have a broad set of problems for you to tackle so you can develop lots of mental tricks and tools to help you later in life. For example, I started in games development and that has a whole host of different things that let me constantly press my skills to the edge. Animations, graphics, physics, state machines, AI, etc…
And lastly, make sure to join open source projects and use github regularly. You want to build a portfolio that people can reference easily. I made the mistake of not doing that, made my journey 10 times more miserable than it needed to be.