Your whole rambling diatribe breaks down to this sentence, "I don't have the balls at age 20 to get out of this predetermined, generally understood path I'm headed on. How the fuck do I do it?"

First off, you should give yourself some credit. At least you know that you are stuck on a path you don't want to be on, the path that others have predetermined for you, and you recognize that it doesn't make you happy, and you want to do something about it. In order to fix something, you must first recognize where the problem lies, and you see that. Like Confucius said, the longest journey begins with the first step, and you have taken it.

But don't start sucking your own dick quite yet. You have a decision to make; you can stay on that path and become a suit, just another numbered cog in the meaningless corporate bullshit world, slowly dying one day at a time in a job you hate doing work no one cares about...or you can choose life. Before you do read anything else, you have to decide: What kind of person am I going to be? Before I can show you how to reach your dreams, you have to decide if you even want to go after them. If you just have a general malaise about your job prospects or your life, well thats super, go drink a fucking beer and shut the fuck. But if you actually want to change something, if you want to get off the shitty path that you are on and get onto one that you like, only then should you keep reading. Make no mistake about it, this is a decision you are making, whether its conscious or not, about how you are going to live your life.

If you decide that you do in fact want to get off the path you are now on, the next thing you must recognize is that if you want to find your personal destiny and achieve happiness, you have an incredibly hard road ahead of you. I know exactly what that road is like and what you have in front of you, and man---I can't even begin to tell you how hard it is. It's quite literally an experience that cannot fully be explained. Breaking from the pack and going out on your own is like no other experience. You must commit to the journey. You must be willing to sacrifice and work and strive and suffer more than those who take the standard path. Just know that it will be hard, harder than you can even understand, and mentally prepare yourself. Do not take the road I took unless you are willing to pay the price.

Now that you have recognized that you don't want to be just another suit, and that you have a difficult road ahead of you, the hard part begins...and I can't really give you much guidance.

You see, everyone has their own destiny, what Paulo Coelho called a "Personal Legend" in The Alchemist, and no one can really tell you specifically what it is. That is what he affixed the "Personal" prefix; it is uniquely yours and no formula or checklist exists to reach it. If you want an instruction sheet for your life where you can check off the boxes, go back to Merryl and be a number. There is always room for one more suit.

Do you think that at any point before I put up TuckerMax.com someone could have told me that this is what I'd be doing? Fuck no. Even if I didn't call you an idiot and a kook, I would never have seen the path to get from Duke Law Student to here. You know why? That path didn't exist. I cut this path myself. I made my own place in the world.

All this being said, I won't just toss you to the wolves and wish you luck. I can't give you a checklist to find your destiny, but I can give you some advice:

-Let go. Just like you can't walk a tight rope if you are clutching the platform, you can't find your destiny if you are clinging to the safety of school, work or family. This doesn't mean that you should drop out of school, cut ties with everyone you know and be unemployed, it simply means that you cannot have both safety and achievement. Achievement requires risk, and risk abhors safety.

-Stop doing what others expect you to do. You are the only one living your life, not your parents, your teachers or your friends. They all have opinions about what is best for you, but what the fuck do they know? Their lives are just as fucked up as yours, and they probably don't even realize it or have the courage to attempt to change it. You cannot cut a path through the jungle of life to your destiny if you are busy satisfying the demands and expectations of others. Love your family and friends, but live for yourself.

-To find you destiny, learn to listen to yourself. A wise man told me when I was only 7 years old that I was going to be a great entertainer one day. I brushed it off because I wanted to be Indiana Jones. For the next 20 years I continued to run from and fight my destiny. I went to the hardest undergrad in the country and majored in a hard science (before switching to pre-law to graduate in three years), then I went to law school, then I tried to run a business. I refused to listen to myself, I ignored all the signs, even though the whole time I was writing, keeping a journal, and often obsessing over skills that would later serve me in my entertainment career but had no application to law or business. It wasn't until I was 26 that I finally stopped doing what I thought I was "supposed" to do and learned to listen to myself and do what I wanted to do, to find my destiny.

The fact is, there is something out there that you should be doing, and it isn't working as a suit at Merryl. You know this, which is why you are so frustrated with your life and why you wrote me that email. I have no idea what that thing is, but my guess is that you probably have an inkling as to what it is. Accept it. Start moving toward your destiny. You don't have to do it all at once, you don't have to drop everything, but you do need to at least start thinking about it now.

But maybe you really aren't sure. Ok, that's fine. Keep on the "prescribed" path for now, but start listening to your soul. It will eventually tell you what it is you should be doing, if you let yourself hear it. The day I knew I needed to commit myself to the entertainment business was the day that I woke up and realized that the only thing getting me out of bed was writing funny emails to my friends and reading great books. I realized that even though I'd spent my classroom time studying economics and law, I'd spent most of my free time reading and writing other things, and that I should stop fighting myself and work in the field that truly interested me.

-One last thing: Have the courage to chase your destiny when it presents the opportunity. If you follow the advice above, it will be difficult, but at some point you will have a chance to chase your destiny. It is a hard road even just getting there, but sadly, that is only the first part of the journey. You must then decide to go after what it is you want. That act--making the conscious decision to step off the beaten path and take the risk to carve your own place in the world--is possibly the hardest thing you will ever do in your life.

I can't definitively tell you how to get that courage. You either have it or you don't. I know I have what it takes; you are reading the very proof of this fact. But I don't know if I could tell you how or where I got it. I do know one thing: The courage to follow your dream has nothing to do with intelligence, race, color, creed, religion, sex or any other way to differentiate one human from another. The strength of character needed to take that risk come from deep within your soul.

I have a notion where it comes from. I think courage is the confidence of knowing that you have what it takes to accomplish your goal, the belief in the rightness of your cause, and the intense desire to get what it is you are after. I don't know though. At the end of the day, it's ultimately one of those things that you feel it or don't.

You started out asking how you can find the balls to do what you want in life. All I can do is point you in the direction you need to go, but you have to make the journey yourself. You have to decide what type of man you want to be. Do you want to be just another number...or do you want to be one of those people who lived their life on their terms, like me. There is very little in life that is a choice, except life itself. Now you have to choose.