The sad truth. If you want to earn the salary of the top 1% then you need to work harder than those in the top 1% so you can catch up to them. Highly recommend upscaling yourself with a very niche skill or a broad and effective set of skills so you can be undeniably great at what you do. You do not need to have a strong network right now. You do not need to have the best tools that cost $200 a month to start coding. You do not need $1,000 in investments to start your side project. You just need to start somewhere. The tl;dr of how I did it was hopping on Gemini ( ai dot dev) and just keeping my head down in work for 2 years. Work for free, work for pennies, work for proof of skill, and post about it online. Then maybe, if you're lucky, you'll get a nice paying job. I went from $0 a month to $400, then $2000, hit $10k for two months then was let go and back to $3000. Finally I got a job and I am at roughly $250k salary. The grind is worth it if you persevere. I wish I could make it so that you didn't have to suffer for two years like I did though.. if I could find a way to condense all the nuance and information that I learned into 3 months and share it, I would... But there is no other advice than for you to just get started, because someone else out there is already working 10x harder for your future job.