It’s always a surprise to people when they hear that I have a twenty-five year old son. Somehow, after all of these years it still shocks me as well. After all, I don't look a day over twenty-two. But it's true;

1. I have an adult son and,

2. Not everyone can look this good at my age.

I credit fresh-pressed carrot juice and the disgusting mix of celery and wheatgrass that I forced myself to drink this morning. I also refuse to wear my glasses when looking in the mirror. I enjoy the organic "airbrushing" effect that my much less than 20/20 vision generates. It's funny, but when I was my son's age, I had, what the optometrist called, "better than 20/20 vision". With time my vision degenerated but fortunately for us humans, as our ocular vision declines with age, our inner vision sharpens.

"Nothing becomes real until it's experienced" - John Keats

Unlike my son and unlike most people, I started my career with a unique set of pressure points bearing down on my shoulders. I left home at seventeen to escape the over-bearing and fundamentalist religious views of my step-father. I had been very sheltered from the world up until the fateful day that I walked out and never went back.

At seventeen, I had to pivot quickly and think on my feet. I wasn't old enough to open my own bank account or register to vote, but I had to find a place to live, generate an income and find some way to complete my education. I did all of those things, but not alone. Somehow I intuitively understood that I needed to build a network of people; some who would support me in more obvious ways and others who would serve as role models and inspiration.

I obviously didn't get everything right, truth be told, I got very little right. I did, after all, have a child before it was wise to do so. But I don't regret a thing.

Nothing happens to us, everything flows from us.

"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years." - Mark Twain

I'm not going to bore you with my life story, but I thought that a little history would be helpful in this context. A few weeks ago, my son and his girlfriend called me from the U.S. Listening to him recount his efforts to prepare for the LSAT I was stunned when he said, "Mom, I have to be honest, so much of what you've said over the years I've discounted as weird woo-woo, but lately I've been thinking and I've noticed that your life just works, your life has always worked despite great odds and yet my life isn't working (I disagree, I think he's doing great) and so I'm starting to think that you might be on to something. So what I'd like to know is, would you start coaching me?"

I was stunned but after processing for a moment, we started talking. As we went through all of the areas of his life and specific experiences, I realised that the best thing to do would be to write all of my advice down so that he can reference it. It then occurred to me that someone else might also benefit from it, so why not share?

So here is the first segment in my "For My Son" series. It's for every person just starting out and for some more experienced people who just need a new perspective. It's hard-earned wisdom and to be honest, I'm only 45, so I'm still learning and still focused on a trajectory that leads to that light you see in the eyes of the elderly, I call it, "the wisdom of elders".

"Whatever is most profoundly spiritual is in reality, most directly practical." - Neville Goddard

There is a lot of talk about spirituality in the workplace nowadays. People are waking up to the fact that historically, corporatism and the education system that feeds it, have operated as an inhuman "machine", a sort of container for human consciousness. This collective realisation is growing and a natural result is that people are searching for more meaning and purpose in what they do and finding ways to disrupt the status quo. The increase of home-office work arrangements was the first step, now there is a growing market for freelancers and platforms that support them, emerging in the West.

This correlates nicely with my first tip:

Think and behave like an entrepreneur, even if you're not.

My son's girlfriend wants to be a veterinarian. She lives in a small town with only two vets, so at the moment, if she wants to gain experience, her options might seem limited. But are they? She told me that she recently visited the largest veterinary practice in her town and left feeling very discouraged. Her description was as follows; "They were busy and seemed like they hardly noticed me and, when I did get to speak to someone she was rude and told me that they don't have any openings. They were just so rude, so F-them!" She was obviously disheartened and felt defeated.

The problem here isn't the vet's office staff or the lack of open positions. The problem is that my son's girlfriend was approaching the vet as a potential employer instead of a potential client.

A client is a collaborator—everyone is your client, all of the time.

Here is what she should have done and what I advised her to go back and do: She should have gone in with a brief letter that outlines her goal to become a vet (explaining motivation) and with an offer to either intern (or volunteer) her time and help with anything the vet needs for a set number of hours per week over a period of eight weeks.

If they accepted her offer to volunteer, she would go into their practice with her eyes and ears open; spotting their pain points and areas where they need help. This means cleaning cages, offering to help with administrative tasks, cleaning windows and anything else that she sees needs to be done. All the while she should be taking notes, listening to conversations between the front desk and pet-owners, between the vet and the staff and the vet and her clients. She should write everything down and compile what she learns so that at the end of the 8-week period, she could present her case and envision a way to continue working with the vet for pay. Even if they don't hire her, she will have gained experience and a good reference. This is the kind of thing that I figured out before age twenty because I was forced to hustle to survive. What it really comes down to is an attitude adjustment and creative thinking.

Move into a state of service instead of servitude.

The words service and servitude share the same root, but there is a world of difference between these two states. The traditional employee/employer dynamic of the past century denotes a mentality of servitude and dependency to many people. If you think of yourself as an expendable part of a machine, then you are going to perceive everything from this state of mind; your behaviour and results will reflect that. If, on the other hand, you know that you are always free and that you have control over the value that you bring to others and that everyone is ultimately your client, your entire way of looking at the world and your connection to it, changes.

The world owes you nothing but you owe yourself everything.

Go to school, get a piece of paper, get a job, work long enough to be promoted; that’s the path many take and it’s a valid path but it’s neither the ‘best’ or the only path. There are other ways to live your life and create your career. You’re the designer of your journey through life. Remember this; when you resign yourself to a system, to the system, you forfeit a piece of your own humanity. Famed poet, engineer and philosopher William Blake said;

"I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create."

He also said, "The creative genius is the True Man". He was referring to what the Greeks called the "daemon" and to what some call "higher self". Putting all psycho-spiritual jargon aside, it's worth noting that in French the word for "mind" is "esprit". It's our responsibility to feed our own souls and to expand our own minds. We can't do that as slaves to a machine. The system is a machine. Our job is to master the machine (in this case societal structures like what we see in corporate environments) instead of letting the machine master us. To this aim, the first thing that must be said is;

If you're not doing what you love, either stop now or use it as a springboard.

Many people in their twenties don't know what they're really good at or what they truly love. This blindspot isn't a fault or a sign of failure, in fact, it's not a blindspot at all. It's the natural progression of life; you're still developing, you're still evolving and, you're on the beginning of a journey that last anywhere from 80-100 years. You will change. If you don't change, something is wrong. Stop pressuring yourself to figure it all out before age twenty-two.

Can you see the immediate reality gap between the real human being and the machine? We're asking our young people to choose a path before age eighteen. We send them to institutions of "higher" learning that are little more than indoctrination hubs. This is changing and has been changing for a while now. But why wait for the system to change completely before you act? You don't need a piece of paper before you can start building your life and career.

Become and autodidact

I've seen so many people, most people actually, go into their jobs, put all of their focus on a narrow scope of activities and do nothing else. Because they think of themselves as "employees" and because their main objective is to collect a pay check, they never really look around at the organisation they're a part of, or the greater market and movements of markets.

When you live your life like an entrepreneur, your eyes are always open and you're always learning. Until recently, I'd never created a company and wasn’t an entrepreneur, at least not on paper. But paper means very little to me; it's the felt and actual experience that matters. Your pay check is the remuneration you receive for offering yourself, your expertise and your time to an organisation towards the fulfilment of their objectives. If you are the "product", shouldn't a good portion of your personal and work time be used for product development? Are you waiting for HR to offer a learning opportunity? Or are you learning new things on your own, as you see markets emerge and evolve?

Finances and circumstances might dictate that you need a certain job with a reliable salary and you probably won't enjoy every moment of every day, but outside of your current circumstances, you have complete control over your self-development and learning. Learn the art of self-teaching, learn to love learning. You may not yet know it, but experience is the air that you breath.

You get to decide what those experiences will be and it's you and only you that acts as the catalyst that launches you into each, successive phase.

Learn the art of strategic spring-boarding.

In the beginning I had nothing. No money, no diploma, no experience but I had a hell of a lot of will and a sheer determination to live an extraordinary life. In the old days they called it "street smarts", in the even older days they called it "learning to hustle". I prefer to think of it as strategic spring-boarding.

At age 21, I was attending the University of South Carolina part-time, while working as a car salesperson. None of this is on my CV because it's irrelevant, but I was the first woman to ever sell cars at a Buick dealership in a small town. There was even a little announcement about it in the local paper! They first turned me down because I couldn't drive a stick-shift. But instead of leaving their office, I told the manager, "ok, then take me out to that empty parking lot behind the building and teach me. I'll bet you ten dollars that I can learn in under and hour." I don't know if he felt sorry for me or amused, but he took me up on the offer. He called out the porter, an elderly man who had worked there for decades, and told him to teach me to drive a manual.

It took 30 minutes. I'll never forget what the porter said to me. He said, "You gotta quick brain, girl". I also got the job. Although I never got my ten dollars. After being there for a few months, I learned that there was even more money to be made in selling pre-fab homes and so I used my car sales experience to springboard into a sales job at a home manufacturer. I didn't love sales, but I did pay attention to the market and I noticed that a segment of finance industry was very involved in the pre-fab home industry.

As the reps from various sub-prime financial institutions would visit us, I talked to them about what they did. I made a couple of contacts and over a period of a few months I called them and basically forced them to tell me everything that they knew, how they did their job, etc. Within a few months I had my first, real corporate job in finance. It sucked, but I learned and I finally earned enough to support my son, get an education and move forward.

The message here is obvious. It doesn't matter if you're twenty with no diploma or thirty-three with an MBA from Insead. Anything can be a springboard because you determine what value you get out of it.

Create a business plan for your life and then scale-up.

"Ambitious people know that each step toward their goals is not a singular step. Each discipline is not a singular discipline. Each project is not a singular project. They see everything they do—and every discipline they adhere to - as a link in the chain of events and actions that will lead them to their final destination." - Jim Rohn

Never plan anything without visualising the outcome first. Use your inner vision to see yourself doing what you would like to be doing and succeeding at it. Don't let anyone tell you that imagination is just the act of daydreaming. Imagination is nothing less than the foundation of all reality. Our culture squeezes much of the imaginative impulse out of children before age seven. Television is used to promote violence instead of human dignity. It's your job to divorce your consciousness from what is considered "a normal way of doing things" and learn what no one teaches us as children; to use your imagination as the primary tool in your toolbox. Imagination comes first and is followed by will.

There are a plethora of resources available to help you map out your life, find those that resonate with you and stick to them. Once you have a concrete vision, use it as the benchmark by which all of your thoughts, feelings and activities are measured. Are your thoughts aligned with your vision? Is your use of time aligned? Write it all down, keep a journal, make lists, use any tool that is helpful but remember, the tool can't help you if you don't use it.

So this is where the "woo-woo" (as my son calls it) comes into the picture:

At the end of the day, you are here to experience the joy of living. There is no amount of money, no title and no social status associated with your true purpose: To create and to love.

In order to create a life that you love, we have to learn to create and learn to love. While we're born with the inherent ability to do both of those things, the mastery comes from practice. You need downtime, you need silence and introspection. Don't rob yourself of the gifts and inspiration that comes from the silence through incessant use of technology or numbing yourself with entertainment.

You'll be fine. Don't worry, don't compare and don't rush. The student becomes the master. That's everyone's destiny, if they want it. We're all in this together.