Decisions made early in life indeed do affect the direction and fulfillment of one's life.
Unfortunately for me, learning came easy and wisdom too late. My mind absorbs concepts easily, and I'm blessed with being able to learn in all three forms of teaching. I can read material, hear a lecture about that material and observe others applying their knowledge of the material and come away with that knowledge embedded in my memory banks equally well by all three. That plus the ability to learn on the fly by doing and figuring it out as I go along has crippled my socioeconomic development.

In my K-8 school homework didn't carry much weight in grading. So I opted not to bother since everything I needed was covered in class. I could easily prove I knew the subject by passing a test. High school was a different matter. Homework was given fifty percent of the weight of the overall grade in a class. I was concerned with learning the material and not with the grade I got because my career path was in the trades. I wasn't going to college. I gradated high school with a 1.5 GPA. It was then I discovered that apprenticeship programs wanted a 2.5 or better to be accepted. No body told me that.

It wasn't until five years later that I was working one dead end job after another that I finally asked how I could get around the GPA deficiency. I was told that I could get a GED with a good percentile. I'm sure that they thought I'd be a couple of years doing that. But I went in and took the GED exam cold. I had indeed learned all the subject matter. I scored in the 85th percentile (equal to a 3.5 GPA in high school). And that was after letting that all slide for five years. But by then I was too old to jump through all the hoops. I had to wait nearly a year for my first time to apply. You can apply only once a year and they never take a person until he's applied at least three times and they also never take a person after age 25. I would be 26 by the time I could apply three times.

Would I trade the might have been life for the one I have now? No. If I had applied myself in high school and jumped through the hoops, and the applied for my apprenticeship I'd never have gone to the Job Corp and would never have found out about the Upward Bound program that led me to take a summer course at U of O where I met my wife and started on this life. Too many good things have come from this life to trade it for a might have been life.