— H. Simpson
In all the heartwarming animes I watch it goes like this: the main character has an absurd, unrealistic aspiration with a strong emotional motivation for it. She makes a lot of desperate and ridiculous efforts to get somewhere, and as a sort of karmic reward she gets somewhere else, not exactly what she intended, but a situation with a lot of fun and friendship and purpose develops, and it turns out that this is now what she wants and it serves the original emotional purpose just the same. However, the initial foolish aspiration was crucial or nothing would have happened.
Never had clear goal and wasnt given any, and I've massively surpassed anything anybody ever expected from me when growing up. But I largely let the flow of life take me as it went, and only in those few crucial moments when you are branching all your future life I went the harder but more interesting way and persisted despite hardships as long as it still made sense. Reasonable hardships are great, they often give back much more than initial costs, in many ways. And walking it alone without any external help is also sort of reward multiplier.
I am in a place in life in early 40s where I have nothing more to achieve or prove, just keeping the direction now is enough to be dying happy about life well lived.
Of course the last thing you wanna do in such place is to think you have it all set and figured out, life has nasty ways to remind you of the chaos just behind many corners.