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Perhaps more important than the question of which route to take is when to decide which route to take. You don't have to decide as early as you might think. A lot of kids decide in high school that they want to be doctors, for example. That's playing with fire. At that age you're unlikely to know what it's really like to be a doctor, or what the other options are. A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way-- including, unfortunately, not liking it.
Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.
Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong. If you read autobiographies (which I highly recommend) you find that a lot of the most successful people didn't decide till quite late what they wanted to do. And not because they were indecisive, or didn't know themselves. It takes a long time to just to learn what different kinds of work are like.