What are good ways to excel in POE?

Playing trade sites is how you excel at PoE.

You make currency flipping items and then buy that item (item editor) off any of the trade sites (tft etc).

Ofcourse people who have a monopoly over trade will tell you otherwise and try to confuse with all sorts of random farming strategies.

just grind

Don't you want to see if you like playing the game first? Get a FOTM build and take it to red maps, decide after.

I love The Dark Tower.

Software development has many paths, tutorials, and guides, with information all over the place. A lot of people get burnt out and quit, while some love it forever. PoE is very similar because it is not always a simple game where green arrow up is good I guess?

I would follow a build guide. Find one where they go into detail about the build. I suggest trickster frostblades from this last season. People will say FB is death, but even at 2.5k life I was able to do non-uber stuff, while still playing...a melee-ranged skill...

But I learned a ton. I learned what things really jumped up my power. My first Maven run was very bad dmg. Then I tried again later after working on a few things and farming currency and man the power gains felt incredible, with kinda shit gear in a lot of slots yet. The part I learned was there are specific areas where you can gain a lot of power, and to exploit those before they are gone lol

Find a path and follow it. If the guide is good you will see why they chose the things they did. Often-times there will be variations on that build by others.