It’s not wise to optimize your life around what regrets you’ll have at your deathbed - death is just one single moment of your entire life.
Instead, design your life such that on an average your days are filled with more happier moments and less unhappy ones.
From my favourite Paul Graham essay
“One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline”
I think if you pick a really hard research problem, try to solve it in <8 weeks, blog everything, shoot videos, ship good oss code and repeat it.
you can get hired by a big lab in ~1 year.