I am the grumpy old man of the group.
The market is saturated with young stage managers right now - it's a hard business to get a leg up in. And remember, it's a life of freelancing, running your own business, marketing yourself, networking, always having some level of stress about your next job, gig, career move . . . It's a life of 60 hour weeks, 6 days a week. A career where family and personal relationships are hard to balance. A job where the compensation RARELY makes up for the amount work and dedication. It's a crap, crap job sometimes; a lot of the time. I have been doing it for over 20 years, and I am pretty successful at it - but it's a lot of hard work, and I still don't feel like I have the "Career" part of it down yet - I get the job part, but the career part is hard.
So, I feel like it's my job to not paint quite the rosy picture.
Can you do it, hell, yes, of course you can, we put a man on the moon. We figured out how to make pop rocks. We can do anything if we put our minds to it. But this is a career about talent, skill, personality, intelligent, artistic sensibility, common sense, perseverance, stamina, endurance - which is hard enough to get one package - and then add a lot of dumb luck.
If you can do anything else for a living an be happy, then I would strongly encourage you to do so.