When I was four years old I wanted to be a Ninja Turtle when I grew up, so I may not be the best "former four year old" to ask. Disclaimer: I didn't grow up to be a Ninja Turtle. I didn't even become a Ninja, or a Turtle. Absolute failure to live up to my four year old dreams

But when I was a bit older I knew "I want to do something with computers", because my family had a windows 3.1 computer and I liked to play games on it. Of course at the time I had no idea what anyone even did with computers. I also had no idea that in the future every single job that exists would be "something to do with computers"

I started taking computer classes in high school which got me into programming, because I wanted to make games. This is a pretty common pipeline for Millennial programmers I think

After that I went to a local university and took Computer Science. Luckily I was just dumb enough to stick with it the whole time and get a bachelors. I say dumb enough somewhat ironically. Obviously doing a BSc in Compsci takes a bit of smarts, but I had friends who became convinced they were too smart to bother with a degree, and all of them who dropped out to pursue their own path without the degree are much worse off than I am now

Anyways, after my degree I no longer wanted to work in games. I wanted to work in embedded systems. Turns out there weren't many opportunities to work in embedded systems in my local market so I got into web dev. Like I said, not my dream job, but I'm very good at it and it has been a really successful career.

So I guess to summarize:

Yes I was pretty lucky to somewhat choose a direction when I was young, even if I didn't know more than "work with computers".

However the dream path still wasn't exactly a straightforward arrow from Ninja Turtle to Web Dev. At every single step it felt like I was compromising on my dreams.

Turns out that compromise can be really good though