My favorite bit of advice ever (poorly paraphrasing Nassim Nicholas Taleb): If you want to be rich or famous - meaning you want to succeed in a field with the potential for exponential growth but a low probability of a large payoff - your best strategy is to maximize your exposure to opportunities with scale potential.

That means: secure a basic level of subsistence that allows you to keep trying, then focus on repeated attempts at activities that can scale exponentially. Think of writing a book, building a SaaS product, or recording a song: things you can sell repeatedly at little or no additional cost, rather than selling your time or labor.

This is equally good advice for an aspiring Punjabi musician in the slums of Lahore and a hopeful software founder at Stanford.