I have a story for you. In high school, I took something called AP Java. I had no idea what the hell Java was. Turns out, it was coding stuff. Well, I sucked at it and hated it. Fast forward to deciding on my college path. I had to pick a major like everyone else. I picked Computer Engineering because I liked computers. What a great way to make a huge life decision... I was clueless about the gravity o these decisions for my future self. That's one of my parents' greatest mistakes with me. They didn't give me any advice on this massively important choice. I, more or less, picked it because it sounded cool. I had no idea what computer engineering was....
Moving on, my second semester at university, I take my first entry/college level programming class. Turns out, it was that damn Java again. Well, this time, I knew a thing or two and I started to grasp what it meant to code. The general concept of programming now made sense. I actually enjoyed the course. After that, I slowly begin to progress with other, various programming courses along with my gen ed and electrical engineering classes.
In my junior year, I take a lab called intro to microprocessors. WTF is a microprocessor?? hell if I knew. Well, this class beat the shit out of me, the took a dump on my face. I was terrible at it. I couldn't grasp the concepts of interrupts and how registers affected how the firmware behaved. Also, what the heck was a debugger!? It took me way too long to figure out why we needed a debugger. (IF you don't know, it allows you to load code onto the microprocessor and step through the code if need be. Since the code is actually running on a little chip and not your PC, you need a way to communicate and stop/start execution of code for debugging, hence the name debugging). I learned so little in this class and my poor partner had to to carry the majority of the workload because I couldn't grasp the required concepts. It was terrible and I hated it.
Around the same time, I was also miserable in one of my electrical engineering courses. It was called signals and systems. It was heavy on digital signal processing and something called a Fourier Transform. Again, this was one of my least favorite courses. I couldn't understand the purpose of Fourier Transforms and the difference between time and frequency domain signals. I felt stupid yet again and was just glad I wasn't an electrical engineer, so I clearly wouldn't need this knowledge for my career later.
WELL, I got a job a few months after I graduated. Woohoo, I made it. However, guess what I was doing... I was designing algorithms for automotive radar systems. My title is software engineer, but what I'm doing should be called a Digital Signal processing, firmware engineer. THE ENTIRE CULMINATION OF EVERYTHING I DESPISED AND SUCK AT FOR THE PAST 5 YEARS. Yet, after I suffered through those college courses, some of this stuff actually made sense and I was able to learn on the job and really excel at both the programming and electrical engineering side of this job. After all those moments of saying I never want to do XYZ again, I made it through and succeeded. I have no idea how, but I did.
Now, what's the moral of this story... I'm actually not sure. I wouldn't say, it's to continue down a path you hate and hope it works out like mine, but, instead, to realize not everything you'll do in life is easy or glamorous. This is especially true for career paths. Not everyone is going to have that dream job or be that special snowflake your mom always told you would be. Sometimes, you just need to put one foot forward every day and get shit done. People who go to work every day, learn, and improve, they WILL succeed. There's something to be said for people who do that, because not everyone does that. Some people wander their whole lives and make nothing of themselves. And there are some people who try to do amazing things, but end of 50 years old wondering what the hell they're doing with their life. I don't know, that was my mini rant thing. Basically, I didn't give up and I succeeded, that was my point. Also, I was kind of stupid because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Don't do that either.