Only my opinion - the VERY first thing you need to do from a strictly "career choice" point of view is expectation management.
Do you want to smack people in the lips?
Do you want to wear dark sunglasses, a fake mustache, and carry a fake passport while wooing hot babes and fooling them into giving you their nations deepest secrets on a super encrypted USB drive so you can help make the world America?
Those are two distinctly different career paths and no matter how hard you train, you will NEVER throw a touchdown pass and a no-hitter during the same game - no matter how good your arm is.
Point-Man-On-The-Door-Kick is NOT going into the room to sweet talk someone out of their information. The singleton doing trade craft in a semi-permissive environment to support intelligence preparation of the battlefield is almost always going to be a complete and utter failure if he puts himself in a position where he has to smack someone in the lips.
It was my experience during 25 years in 'the industry' that you can only work at the tip of one spear at a time. If you want to shoot mother fuckers in the face, you don't need to worry about how well you speak your target language - you just need to be able to master the fundamentals of combat marksmanship under the rigors of extreme physical exertion. That means you have to devote your training to being able to silently patrol 3 or 4 kilometers over hill and dale (or more, depending on how far away the last terrain feature was); fighting your way into a compound, clearing your way through numerous buildings and several stairwells without being too winded to take a precise rifle shot - in the dark - without hitting an innocent noncombatant or team mate.
Furthermore, a knuckle-dragger that can do everything in the above paragraph without breaking a sweat has not really done anything to serve as a stepping stone into a job as a shadowy intel operative that is able to conduct meaningful and productive close target reconnaissance and asset management in an environment were just looking like an American is enough to be arrested on espionage charges.
The back side of that is the size of the SOF community. You are pondering a career in an industry that is just big enough to be globally lethal while still being small enough to afford everyone the opportunity to quickly draft their own reputation. Once you get a reputation as a stepping stone practitioner, NOBODY will want to work with you because they will see that your priority lies in the next stone and not the continuity and success of the team.
A spear only has one tip and the stepping stone approach to glory and greatness is for people that don't have confidence in their abilities to truly serve at the tip of that spear. If you worry about the tip of multiple spears, none of the tips will ever be as sharps as they could be.
Parents that tell their kids, "you can be whatever you want to be if you put your mind to it" are terrible parents that are only proliferating shattered dreams and unrealistic goal setting.
My advice to tons of folks over the years has always been the same:
-Figure out what you REALLY want to do with your life.
-Go out and do that shit - and do that shit to the very best of your ability.
Just my two cents though - I've never been anywhere or done anything that has led me to a spot on the new york times best seller list
