A dream of mine and why it should not happen.

Nah man. You do not desire the person to end up in a dangerous situation. You want to rescue him. It's not like "I want BAD SITUATION to happen so that I could do HEROIC DEED", but more like "If BAD SITUATION happened, I'd do HEROIC DEED". The difference is very subtle but noticeable.
You just want to be a good person. How the heck can that be selfish, Jesus?!

That's an interesting paradox. I was watching a show on NBC recently called The Good Place which presented a similar conundrum. It is a comedy about a girl who was a pretty shitty and selfish person her whole life. She dies in a fatal shopping cart accident in a supermarket parking lot. She awakens in the afterlife, in some perfect opulent fantasy archetype of heaven, presumably by mistake. She struggles to fit in with all the nice people and its later revealed that this afterlife was a demon's mindgame design to torture her by making her spend her eternal afterlife in a world where she couldn't possibly fit in. What appeared to be her "Good Place" was actually her "Bad Place" and the rest of the season is a series of episodes where she's trying to do good deeds for people so she can get admitted into the real "Good Place."

One of the caveats however is that she's not allowed to get moved into the Good Place despite her good deeds because they are done begrudgingly with the intention of seeking rewards later. In order to get into the Good Place she would have to learn to do good things for the sake of doing good things and not for your own self interests.

Based on what you said it sounds like you're conflicted with the problem of wanting the status of a hero a bit more than wanting a person other than yourself to be rescued, even though wanting either one, or even both of those two things would require the same course of action.