Set yourself some goals. The main killer of this game for many is that lack of guidance and direction. Read the forums, always have Inara.cz, eddb.io and coriolis.edcd.io open in a browser (I use my smartphone mainly) for reference. You want to visit Earth? A worthy goal. Make sure you only work for the Feds until you've earned enough reputatoin with them to get the Sol permit (new players cannot go to Earth). This will also unlock my favourite combat ship for you, the Federal Assault Ship, at the same time. Consider that at some point you are going to want to travel 5000ly in order to fulfil this requirement to access the most important engineer, professor palin. You will have MANY hoops to jump through before you even get to him, but consider doing the 5000ly of exploration sooner rather than later (as soon as you have a ship that can jump more than 40ly, a cheap option is the Diamondback explorer), because you will be able to get to grips with the main mechanics of the game, flying around, in and out of supercruise, etc, etc, in a safe environment (everything stops and you are alone once you get outside the bubble), get a decent exploration rank, bam, just like that (helpful for high paying passegner missions, which have payouts based on your exploration rank), and you'll be ablet o decide if one of the core mechanics of the game (exploration) is at all appealing to you (and if it isn't, don't worry, there are plenty of other things to do!) plus you will make around 30m credits just from disco scanning, a lot more if you use a surface scanner on a few high value planets. When you get back you'll be ready to build your next ship.