When I was 18, just finishing high school, I had no idea what direction to take. There was a not-for-profit in my area doing aptitude testing, so I went through a huge battery of tests over several weeks. The two top career paths that emerged were mechanical engineering and physical therapy. Neither really appealed to me; I lacked the math affinity for engineering, and I was put off by the long schooling required for PT. So over the following decades I did lots of very different things, all of which I was pretty good at, but none that I found very satisfying over the long term.
Then, in my early fifties, I lost a job and had to broaden my search into new fields. Quite by accident, I stumbled upon my current job designing and making equipment for people with disabilities. It’s an amalgam of precisely the two fields that those tests recommended so long ago (but without the nasty bits that kept me from pursuing them). And this really is the perfect job for me.
So I’d say that it was clear early on what kind of work I’d find fulfilling, but it took a long time for circumstances to align. None of that time was wasted, though; all of the experiences I gained in all of those intermediary jobs have ended up being very useful in unforeseeable ways. I’m better at what I’m doing now because of all of the odd-ball stuff I’ve done before.