> know what exactly it will take to reach their goals That was the problem when you tried it. No one ever really knows that, and if someone over focuses, it only takes a little change in the world around us to derail them. > none of my plans were thought through well enough They never are. Our plans have lots of unrecognized dependencies and all it takes is for one of those to go in a different direction than we implicitly expected to sprawl us on the floor watching our plans wither away. That used to be one of the benefits of college. You may study architecture as a major, but you have just as much study spread out among a dozen other subjects, so if the major doesn't pan out, you have enough background to do something else. It doesn't seem to be working as well anymore, but that was how it used to be. > I probably should have gone to trade school rather than college Depending on when you went to college and where you lived as you tried to establish your career afterwards, that may not have helped either. Personal example: the rents were rising quickly in the place I grew up, so I had to move to another area. Once I got there, I discovered that there were few local jobs ... mostly low-wage retail and restaurant jobs. People were commuting 50-100 miles away to get work. I went to college and earned all the way up to a master's degree before I got a decent job ... 100 miles away. I may say "I should have gone to trade school" but that would not have made much difference. The people I knew who did trade school wound up moving out of town to get jobs. The only thing that had a lot of local openings was truck driving. About the only alternative pathway that would have been viable for me was moving to another part of the country. So don't kick yourself over choosing college over trade school. You made what you thought was the best choice, based on the information available to you at the time. I should also mention that I told my kids and grandkids to consider plumbing, as that's the one job that will always be needed. So far, none of them has gone that direction.

Yup!