No Stupid Questions

Find what you love and let it kill you.
For me this was philosophy which is the opposite of convenient or helpful especially in our current era. It led to me consistently blundering my way forward but it serving as an initial point is the critical lesson to be learned, I think.

I didn't.

I have no fucking idea. I just finished HS, still don't know. So I'll go to college. Something in IT, I didn't even check the specifics or subjects until I was already accepted and signed up. All I know is the program is regarded as one of the hardest, described by past students as "Vietnam war", with one of the first recommendations to pass being "Get a therapist."

I'll probably get kicked out after 1st semester due to math. I am not good at it, and it's apparently quite hard there, though not the worst either.
Hopefully not. I don't know what else to do.

Now, if my future paycheck wasn't a problem (i.e. not living in capitalist society), I'd know precisely what I'd want to do, and I known so since 1st year of HS. I wouldn't even need college.
Step 1 is getting a driver's license (just for regular cars), probably just due to bureaucracy. Step 2, sign up for train driver's course at ZSSK. The course itself is 6 months, then 720 hours of practice and after finishing the state exam, you finally become an actual train driver. So around a year.
But it isn't paid so well.

In IT, preferably something around wireless telecommunications and networking. The faculty I'll be going to apparently has their 2G, 3G and 4G networks students can play around with (from their website). But when I asked about it on open doors day I was met with "We have that? Maybe."
Asking about telecommunications, I got ping ponged between 2 faculties of the same university. Students from faculty of electrical engineering told me that if somewhere it's something offered on faculty of informatics. Staff of faculty of informatics told me it's most likely to be found on faculty of electrical engineering.

So I don't fucking know what I am getting myself into.

Hell, I'm approaching a half-century, and I still don't know what I want to do. :P
Mostly fell into what I'm doing now. Never would have guessed that this is my life, when I was younger.

By doing the next obvious thing until I'd tried enough things to be sure where I wanted to be. Took until my late 30s, but the stuff before that was fun and/or interesting too.

College. You have no idea what jobs are even possible to do until you put yourself out there. Learn a couple skills, find an avenue that interests you and dive in. I've just stumbled into most things but wanted to do something that would be useful in everyday life too. Became a cook then a chef, went to trade school for auto mechanics. Now I run a marina?! PSA: Don't buy a boat!

How did you decide what to do with your life? What free wisdom can you share?

Try things. Experience everything open to you. Seek out even more experiences. You will find lots and LOTS of things that you don't like, but the more you do, you'll start picking up pieces of concepts you like. Those will guide you to making the next set of choices. Rinse repeat until you have a partially formed direction, then follow that direction and see where it leads you. I am shocked how many little "dead end" skills or experiences allowed me to take a next step into something moving me forward. There's no way in hell anyone could have given me a list and said "these are the experiences that will pay off".

Also there are some hard truths to life and you identify skills/talents/affinities you have when talking about your career:

• You can be good/talented at ThingX
• You can like doing ThingX
• There is a market for ThingX and people will pay you good money to do it.

For a very few number of people, they get all three. Most people have to settle for two and muddle through. You cannot move forward with a specific ThingX if you only have one.

Also, trying to be the best at something professionally will be nearly impossible. Even if you get there for a moment, the world is just too big, and there will always be someone better than you at a specific thing professionally soon. Trying to scrap to stay at the peak is an unsustainable road to ruin. However, being just pretty good at two different things that intersect is VERY achievable, and you will be competing against a tiny handful of people that have those same two skills. Thats the sweet spot. Your skills and ebb and flow between your two specialties over your career and you can ride the wave professionally when one starts waning, you can lean into the other one. At times, both of your skills will be in demand, and you will be extremely valuable and employable. Cash in when that happens and take the work with the full knowledge that it doesn't last. Save during the good years and your lean years will be an easy ride.

It was the only thing I’m really good at, and I enjoy doing it.

Turns out, I like doing it for me, not as much doing it for some big corpo. But hey, I’m still good at it.

Now I get to do it for me again, cause I started my own business, and I’m a lot happier than I was in my twenties and early thirties.

Might be obvious, but see what topics or broad subjects you like or dislike and use them to narrow down your options. Also applies to skills or processes. If you enjoy creating something from scratch or solving problems for example, that could help you decide on a career or category of careers you'd have fun (or at least not dread) doing. For an admittedly extreme example I've been set on engineering since sixth grade not because I had some pre-existing passion for R&D or building stuff, but because I liked math and science (but not biology, fuck biology) and hated memorization (and humanities pretty much by extension). If you don't have the information about yourself to choose these kinds of criteria, then you should try new stuff until you do. This could be coding, a new language or even sewing or whatever, but the best way to get to know yourself is to expose yourself to new things and see what sticks and what doesn't.

It was an accident

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Well. First my body made it clear I had to eat and drink. Then it became clear I had to have shelter. Then I realized I just have to do whatever I can get my hands on doing to not die. So that's what I'm doing.

Unless your mommy and daddy have a lot of money, you're not going to have a whole lot of choice in the matter. You're just going to do what you have to.