Here’s my backstory, my approach, my beliefs.
First, I believe the core thing is that you have to have a personal set of curiosities. You should write this down. Working backwards, some of mine are things like, “Is it possible for someone to be Extremely Online and also psychologically well-adjusted, happy, fulfilled?” I believe the answer is yes, and I believe I’m living out the answer. My books, Friendly Ambitious Nerd and Introspect are both imperfect articulations of my solutions.
A big thing people struggle with is a sense of identity. How do you talk about your stuff to other people? How do you not seem maladjusted, crazy, unhinged? It helps to have friends who also care about your stuff. It also helps, for wider society, to have a “cover story” of some sort. My cover stories might be “I am an author” – I’ve written and self-published two books. They’re ebooks. You can write an ebook in google docs and then export it as a pdf and publish it on gumroad, all for free.
Another big thing people struggle with is money. For me, early on this meant working a proper job for several years. I spent 5.5 years working in marketing for a software company. I made a pretty decent amount of money by local Singaporean standards amongst people who don’t have degrees.
It helps to have a low standard of living, to generally avoid expenses as much as possible. In practice some people seem to struggle with this because it might mean being deviant from the norms of the social group that you’re in, and this might mean exiting that social group in small and big ways. Leaving a social group can feel like a kind of death. Those of us who’ve done it know, and can recognize each other. If you’ve never done it before, I guess I’d recommend reading memoirs of people who’ve done it – people who’ve left cults and so on.
A thing I personally consider important is having relationships. I do not believe in romanticizing the idea of a secret scholar operating in private, shut off from the rest of the world, making amazing things happen. Such radical individuals might occasionally exist, but I consider this to be a bad strategy. Consider The Losev Problem.