WHY DO YOU KEEP GOING?

I could say I keep going because I want to own a business, a house, a successful team, a happy family and enough money in the bank to buy all that twice over. The truth is I want all of that, and I strive to get it every time I hit record or each time my pen and pad meet. But it's so much deeper than that.

See, I'm just a normal 21 year old with dreams and ambitions of becoming the next biggest thing, and staying that way for a lengthy period of time while I dabble in industries I've always wanted to. Ok, so maybe not that normal… This is the problem. Everyone is stuck.

Let's go back a moment: I'm 18, it's 8am and I'm not sure if it's my dad shouting my name or my alarm that's woken me up. As I turn over to turn the alarm off I feel sick, drunk, high, and not ready to get up. I probably stumbled in an hour ago, fell asleep in my clothes after having unprotected sex and guzzling, sniffing and smoking my night away.

The plan was simple - go to work everyday at 8:45am,

work 9am till 1pm where I would have my break (and order my substance of choice that night off my 'guy'),

finish my shift at 5pm,

be home and in the shower by 6pm,

eat with dad and be out the house and ready to pick up what I ordered by 6:45pm,

head round to a friends where we would start drinking until we hit the pub at 8pm.

From 8pm till 12pm we would drink as much as our bodies could hold and lightly consume any substance that came our way, and when the pub chucked out we had two choices:

go back with that bird you've been chatting to all night and get a quickie in or go back to your boys house and have a session until sunrise.

Sometimes, if you had just enough gift of the gab, you could bring her back to your mate's, use and abuse the spare room in his council flat and then all get on it in the kitchen listening to Capital XTRA on the TV until we either run out of gear or collapse.

Let's say I got lucky and we got the third choice - it's now 5am and we are running out of gear, beer and vodka. Cigarette and bong smoke fills the room. At least 2 people are passed out on the sofa and everyone else is on their phones trying to get a half dropped off but with no luck. The bag is finished and we leave for home and stumble in to our quiet miserable homes at 6am. At 8am the alarm goes off and the cycle repeats.

This is where people get stuck.

When you have a routine like that, it's not like you've ever sat down with a pen and pad to plan out your life like a Wolf of Wall Street scene, hour by hour consuming substance by substance and drink by drink. We didn't keep count of what we consumed, we just did it. But during this part of our life we just fall into it as a routine and the biggest problem is not the drugs, drink, unprotected sex, attitude or parties. Although these are problems on their own, the biggest one of them all is the acceptance that we have, the acceptance that "this is life now".

You become a great party animal and bundle of fun to crack open a bottle and do a few lines with, but each time you do so, a part of your dream fades away and you think its normal to accept that this is it, and that your dreams are legit nothing but dreams.

I've fallen into this hole many times and couldn't get myself out of it until I started hearing the right things from the right people and that's why I keep going.

I keep going for everyone who has a talent and a purpose who has accepted that the pit of misery and bad routine they are in right now is their legacy. We all are capable of so much and as much as you glamourise your idols and favourite celebrities, at some point in the past they were just regular people like you and I. People who I look up to - Tupac Shakur, Eminem, Kanye West, Jay Z, Gianni Versace, Kevin Hart, Jessie Reyez and others - were just kids in shit places at one point, reached that fork in the road and either chose the 'routine' or the 'future' path.

The question is, are you at that fork in the road? Which path will you go down? I'm on my way down the path to help me and my team's future but believe me when I say that there are many short side roads back on to the 'routine' path.

Stay on track and never let somebody's opinion of you become your destiny.