Doing what you love is the dream for many and a reality for some. However, it comes with its own difficulties and pitfalls along the way — perhaps even more — and it's not for everyone.
This is a particularly great video from Mark Denney. It's not only an interesting story well told, but it's an honest one too. My story isn't dissimilar in a number of ways, but also vastly different in places too. While I didn't have a long corporate career, I did have a three-and-a-half-year one. Despite it being relatively short, it taught me a lot about what I didn't want. I'd grown up answering the question of "what do you want to be when you're older" with "bank manager", "business owner", "trader", or whatever job I'd most recently heard makes the most amount of money. In actuality, that wasn't what I wanted at all. I was earning reasonable money for a teenager (albeit an adult one) and I could see paths I could take to even more, but I loathed it.
When I finally made the leap into working in my passion, I was prepared for it to be difficult, but perhaps not in ways I predicted. Doing what I loved gave me a lot of freedom over hours and direction, but money was much harder to come by and I had to be scrappy. That takes its toll on you after a while and I definitely had many moments like Denney described where you weren't doing as well as you hoped and your self-confidence was waning. If you're thinking about doing what you love, you really need to be prepared to fight for it, and all that comes with that.
What would you have done differently or better, IF you had known all this 3 years ago? Wouldn't it have kept you from putting the energy in that was required at the beginning to make it the success it is now? Wouldn't it have put you off altogether before even starting out on your new adventure?