I honestly think more folks need a much bigger fire up their ass.<p>Taking until 30 to start doing something productive with your life and to end the party-party-party phase is, well, slow? Why spend your most productive years in the wilderness?<p>I do much of what I do from compulsion - I never had the luxury of being able to sit around and contemplate my future on someone else's dollar - I left university heavily in debt, paying my brother's school fees, lumbered with a mortgage on a great aunt's house, with two parents who had gone into hiding on opposite corners of the globe, deep in denial over their divorce proceedings. I left uni with nowhere to go, no money, lots of obligations, and about a week to find myself income before my world imploded.<p>I found my first job three days after graduating - I went up to London, and went and annoyed financial services companies by literally banging on their doors and going 'interview me'. Eventually someone bit, I spent 18 months there before jumping ship and starting my own thing. This isn't some dim mythical past when jobs grew on trees, rather 2005, and most of my cohort ended up moving home with the folks because they couldn't find jobs - because they didn't try hard enough, because moving home with the folks <i>was an option</i>.<p>When you remove your fallbacks, all you can do is climb and hope there's somewhere you can take a rest further up.<p>When I look at my brother (seven years younger) and myself, there is one defining difference between his upbringing and mine - there's always been someone there to bail him out, to pick up the pieces, to solve his problems for him. Far too often that someone has been me. He's leading his own path, finding his own way, but he <i>is</i> going to be 30 by the time he finds it.<p>Finally, part of finding the path is realising that there is no path but the one you make, and that it is its own goal.<p>There's nothing at the end of it, enjoy the walk.