First, this is just optional. And - the path of seeking the truth for yourself, and to find a way out of the suffering of conditioned existence for yourself is still something wonderful. If you do that - then you become less of a nuisance to the world, come to help others, compassionate towards others, loving kindness etc anyway because those barriers we have harm ourselves as much as others. So your actions may be much the same whether you are motivated to reach enlightenment yourself, or motivated to help all beings reach enlightenment. And the end point is the same. Eventually if you follow the path of an arhat, you realize non self, then you eventually also become Buddha also.

After all if you really and truly realize non self - how can you make a separation and say that it is "you" who has realized non self, and somehow others have not? At it's most subtle level, then as your understanding and realization deepens, you find that everyone is Buddha. Also insects, animals, birds. Even inanimate things like stones somehow carry the message of enlightenment, everything you see is a pure land in this sense,  although you wouldn't in Buddhist context say they are enlightened beings.

But some may be inspired to the bodhisatva path at an early stage.

And it's something that has to come from your heart. Though you can aspire to it and that's the first step, when you take the bodhisattva vows if you do that, in the Mahayana traditions, it's not like instantly you put others before yourself, have only ever compassion and loving kindness etc etc :). If only it was that easy :).

It's an aspiration to start with. Which goes through many stages before it first becomes unshakeable - like that there's no way you'd ever not be a bodhisattva in the future even sickness, suffering, Alzheimers, forget all the teachings =you ever learnt, maybe reborn as an animal, or insect, whatever happens in this life and through all future lifetimes, it's so fundamental to your orientation in life that everything is somehow motivated in this way. It is possible to reach that point, at least the stories say so. But we start off at a much simpler stage, where you just aspire to help others.

And there are three kinds of bodhisattva, as I was taught (not sure of the sutra sources etc). You can't choose which kind you'll be. It depends on the situation and all are good.

The first is a king bodhisattva, who aspires to help all beings, but realizes they are not able to do so, so they first work on themselves, maybe in retreats in caves, maybe in other ways, meditating, or it could be through working on their own conduct, restraining from the harmful conduct like lying, stealing, killing, sexual misonduct, intoxicants that may lead you to do all the other things. So you can do this just to help yourself. But you can also do it because you realize that for as long as you do those things, it seriously handicaps your ability to help others. So whatever it may be, at that crude level of working on basic morality because you've got into habits that make it really hard to do anything without continually hurting others - or developing compassion, love, wisdom, seeing through illusions that confuse you, learning to relate directly to truth - you may work on all this mainly in yourself, but with the aim to help others.

The second is the ferryman bodhisattva. Who has the same understanding that they need to work on themselves, but they also realize that others need to work on themselves, very strongly and are able to relate to that in such a way that while they are following the path, they also help everyone around them to do that also. So they also may be doing atrocious things, maybe you are a gang member beating people up and killing people - but you find a way to the dharma, and then - as you do so, you find that it's not just you making this journey but all your fellow gang members also. All still doing really bad things as ordinarily understood, but there's something happening there - they are moving in a direction - what matters is not where you are now, but where you are headed. And so - you may find that you are moving along with all beings, everyone you encounter, even people you are not directly connected with - a sense of journeying together along the path.

The third is the shepherd bodhisattva. The idea here is that a shepherd only cares about his or her sheep. And will do anything for them. Don't think about themselves. In this case, you don't care if you are silly, doing bad things according to what everyone expects of you, making endless mistakes, apparently hurting others when you meant to help etc etc. But you just care about others. You may see others developing insight, love, compassion, or whatever, and that's all you care about, that they find their way along the path. You just aren't bothered about what happens to you. This path reaches its extreme in the "mad yogins" of Tibetan Buddhism, who may do the most extraordinary things. They are not following a path to their own enlightenment at all. All they care about is others. They may incidentally become enlightened along the way. But that's not where they are headed at all.

So, many westerners hear about the "mad yogins" and think "that sounds great, I'd like to be one of those". But that's the very worst motivation for it, because you are only thinking about yourself there. You can't follow that path in this way.

And some people might try to imitate them - get drunk, do stupid things, generally forget about the path altogether. This is very dangerous, even in ordinary physical sense you may have accidents, or hurt yourself in many ways. Not at all recommended.

So, you can try to imitate any of these approaches. But it doesn't work. You end up just producing a kind of act, as if you were acting in a play, but with no substance to it.

You have to find your own path. And there's nothing wrong at all with setting out to find enlightenment for yourself. Indeed that's by far the most normal way to begin. And if you do that you are only being honest with yourself. Aspire to the bodhisattva path, maybe even take the bodhisattva vows to give a connection to that path, if you want. But the most important thing is to be truthful to yourself. To see through all those pretences you may make of being a bodhisattva or compassionate being.

But on the other hand, being a bodhisattva is not a difficult thing in a way. All you need is this underlying motivation to help others, as an aspiration. You don't need to be able to turn into a light display, or do extraordinary acts of self sacrifice, or generosity. No need to give everything you have away either - this won't help. You can't give away your clinging to your possessions, and if you give the possessions away you are left worse if anything, without the things you had before, which maybe would have been useful to help both you and others - and with even more clinging than before chances are, immense regret for the things you no longer have.

To be a bodhisattva, an aspiring bodhisattva on the path, all you need is this wish to help all others to happiness and to freedom from suffering in whatever form is right for them. As an aspiration. Even if next moment you get angry with your neighbour or get in a horrible tortuous argument with someone, or are very miserly or whatever it is, still, if you have that aspiration, you are on that path.

For this reason also it is impossible to tell whether someone else is a bodhisattva or not.

And if you follow the bodhisattva path, then yes, even ants have potential to be Buddha.

The easiest way to see this is to think of future potential. The ant has only dim awareness of this world - but in that dim limited awareness, there's all the potential of a Buddha, or so they say in the teachings. Very unlikely to become enlightened as an ant, but - in future when the ant dies - well we don't know what happens when beings die. Maybe it takes rebirth in some other form. So you are relating to that future of the ant. And doing it in a way that sees less division, maybe no division, between its future and the present. So then you can see it as Buddha. Because in the future it is Buddha and that future Buddha is something you can relate to in this present ant.