| "I feel I've wasted a lot of time over the years smoking weed."
That's a crutch. Plenty of people smoke trees and are productive (i.e., handle your biz during the day and work hard and at the end of the day, "relax").
"I know a lot about the music buisness but not enought to understand weather I should (or even could) find a mixing engineer to mix my music or weather I should have it all in my own hands but start at age 25."
I'm 35 and have been involved with working with the "industry" since I was 19. I started off with a Casio CZ-1 synth (when I was around 14) that I begged my pops to buy me because I thought at the time that's all I would need to make jams like Planet Rock. To spare you a long ass story, I'll just say that from that time up until now, I've had many experiences with the "industry" and with a lot of other cats who are trying to break in, and with regards to your question, this is my honest best answer:
You can't do it all on your own. Everyone I know who raps, produces, mixes, masters, promotes, tries to book shows, tries to slang the CD-Rs at the shows and on the streets, edits the youtube videos, manages the myspace account all on their own, end up running out of hours in their day to do anything meaningful.
Mixing - takes a lot of years to learn how to use all of the effects at their best capacity (especially learning when not to use them), not to mention that even with all the available cracked software out there, the really good tools aren't "downloadable" so the investment to getting a really decent setup for mixing is quite a bit (eventually you realize that the room you're mixing in is going to require an investment as well).
In short: Do you want to be an artist or a mixer? To do both really well will require most of your day's focus.
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