there is this saying ", The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."
What are you currently doing to make ends meet? If you are not enjoying, chances are that success would not come easy, and you might eventually have to sell your soul (principles, faith, health, family relationships, etc)  to attain success.
The mistakes started from following the crowd, being forced to pursue careers by parents, not knowing one's self sufficiently before choosing a career, etc. This makes me remember the story of the animal school "Once upon a time, the animals decided that they should do something meaningful to meet the problems of the new world, so they organised a school.

They adopted an activity curriculum of running, climbing, swimming and flying.  To make it easier to administer, all of the animals took all of the subjects.

The duck was excellent at swimming.  In fact, he was better than his instructor.  However, he made only passing marks in flying and was very poor at running.  Since he was so slow in running, he had to drop his swimming class and do extra running.  This caused his webbed feet to become badly worn, meaning that he dropped to an average mark in swimming.  Fortunately, “average” was acceptable, therefore nobody worried about it – except the duck.


The rabbit started at the top of the class in running, but developed a nervous twitch in his leg muscles because he had so much makeup work to do in swimming.

The squirrel was excellent in climbing, but he encountered constant frustration in flying class because his teacher insisted that he start from the ground up instead of from the treetop down.  He developed cramps from overexertion, so he ended up with a C in climbing and a D in running.

The eagle was a real problem student and was severely disciplined for being a non-conformist.  In climbing class, he beat all of the others to the top, but insisted on using his own way of getting there!"

so what are you doing to follow the masses, get out of the rat race and take the path least trodden and like in the poem, it would make all the difference.