The company I work for now pays substantially more than Google/Facebook/et. al and most people on my team are from random state schools, many with no experience at FAANG. You can certainly make millions from a pre-IPO startup (and I have 2nd degree knowledge of many people that did get rich off IPOs), but you're not making that at the Google of today.
I'm sorry you feel that way about your past. You should consider seeing a counselor. I've found that a growth mindset is important to ensuring you keep succeeding because there's nobody you can just copy once you've made it this far. Failures shouldn't be depressing but motivating instead. All this "I should have" thought should be "Now I know I should" instead. In your case, "I should have aimed higher" -> "I will aim higher now that I know". I can definitely empathize with you - I played video games all day in high school and only got into CS because of playing video games 5 hours a day and wanting to work with them. I screwed around freshman and sophomore year and destroyed my GPA. I came back and grinded and brought it back up the rest of my years.
Good luck. I'm sure you're more brilliant than you think if you made it to Amazon. If you ever need motivation go read the Reddit threads on people saying how hard it is to make it to Amazon.
I'm sorry you feel that way about your past. You should consider seeing a counselor. I've found that a growth mindset is important to ensuring you keep succeeding because there's nobody you can just copy once you've made it this far. Failures shouldn't be depressing but motivating instead. All this "I should have" thought should be "Now I know I should" instead. In your case, "I should have aimed higher" -> "I will aim higher now that I know". I can definitely empathize with you - I played video games all day in high school and only got into CS because of playing video games 5 hours a day and wanting to work with them. I screwed around freshman and sophomore year and destroyed my GPA. I came back and grinded and brought it back up the rest of my years.
Good luck. I'm sure you're more brilliant than you think if you made it to Amazon. If you ever need motivation go read the Reddit threads on people saying how hard it is to make it to Amazon.