1. Allocate a percentage of monthly income to magical reading. Then do the reading. Resell the books that turn out to be crap. Treasure and annotate the others. Learn to detect fluff / dark fluff / abject bullshit before you buy. At this step, get an easy grimoire and start experimenting. It will blow up in your face if you're on the right track. Only move on to the next step if and when you can recover from your horrible magical mistake(s). Discover a place where you can talk to other people about magic, people who are not insane, so unstable that they're obsessed with paranoid banishing, severe identity gatekeeping, selling / losing their souls, or living in a false world of love and light / hate and darkness.
2. Choose a single tradition or cluster of interrelated traditions, but be open to unexpected combinations (i.e. chi gong helps with ceremonial energy raising, zazen helps you stay sane while exploring the Aethyrs, etc.). Learn about this in depth. 20 books minimum. Take notes. Even take courses. Become an amateur expert but keep silent about everything unless you're interacting with those who clearly get it and can contribute.
3. Learn to raise physical and spiritual energy—because they're connected. Get in shape. Practice some form of energetic healing (Reiki, pranic, etc.). Discover your hereditary predispositions for disease and addiction and decide which of these triggers you can live (or die) with and which you need to cut out of your life. Determine, using the best tools available, your probable year of physical death. Now you have a time frame for your Great Work. If you need therapy, start it, if possible. Most of us do.
4. Learn your tradition's banishing, warding, centering, and grounding. Practice daily. Don't talk about it much to avoid causing "Gunfighter Syndrome" in your magical friends.
5. Internalize your tradition's symbol set through study and small magical explorations. Pay attention to your dreams. Cut ties with people and commitments holding you back. Be ruthless in this. At the same time, read Jung on alchemy. Ask yourself why and how Jung could be so magical and still be regarded as a leading thinker by mainstream culture to this day. Your answer to this should have a practical application to how you move among the magically unawakened.
6. Learn to put energy inside symbolic containers and send it forth in larger workings. Keep scrupulous records of successes and failures. Learn how to form mundane pathways of manifestation for your workings in play. Get out of poverty. Learn creative visualization and start viewing yourself in the best possible light. Add this to your daily practice. Tell anyone who argues with what you're doing to go fuck themselves. It's your life. You can be a magician if you want to. Keep cutting people and commitments away. The more free you become, the more power you can access in your life for doing what you want to do. This is hard.
7. Make friends with the elements. Make sure those spiritual relationships manifest through a connection with the land and genii loci. Annotate a new grimoire, start using it, and start experimenting with faery magic. Stop putting down Wicca. Read and annotate Huson's Mastering Witchcraft.
8. Learn the fundamentals of western astrology. Develop some understanding of planetary magic. (Doesn't have to be full-on Christopher Warnock. Could just be a set of planetary invocations.) Find the magical locations around you. Do magic there.
9. Perform daily solar adorations. Balance this through regular interaction with symbols and deities of darkness. Walk the thin line between the celestial and the chthonic. Bow to no power. Make no deal that you cannot satisfy. Always retain your magical and spiritual independence. Find a style of demonic evocation that doesn't make you feel (too) uncomfortable. Experiment.
10. Learn what the "Linear Tradition" is in western esoteric systems and do some complex workings from it (not just vel Reguli or the SIRP). Get a harder grimoire. Learn to appreciate the writing and ideas of Stephen Skinner, even if you disagree with him. Read: Dion Fortune, AO Spare, Scott Cunningham, Florence Farr, Blavatsky, Randolph, Agrippa, Ficino, Bruno, Paracelsus, Waite, Levi, LaVey, Evola, Rankine, Flowers, Robin Artisson, Z. Budapest, Starhawk, Michael Aquino, Don Webb, and (always, ongoing) Aleister Crowley. How much of their thinking can you absorb and assimilate? What can you discard?
12. Paying back is a virtue. By now, your magical chops should be kind of blinding. Bless your friends. Curse your enemies. Curse the old enemies you're no longer mad at. Bless the people who helped you make it to where you are. Learn how to cut "ako" cords and then actually cut them. Find an ideal to pursue. Find a god of that ideal that interests you. Assume that "godform" on a regular basis. You will attract weaker practitioners like moths to a flame. Don't give into the urge to exploit them with lesser magic. At most, send them in a direction of self-discovery. Don't become a tin guru. Get the Book of Oberon and come to terms with Elizabethan magic in all its daunting glory—another self-test: can you make it work?
13. Read a lot of Jake Stratton-Kent. Have the temerity to disagree with him if you must. But slowly and methodically consider his views. At this point, you may want to consider getting to know your personal Daemon. You don't have to do Abramelin. Samekh or just a sustained performance of the Headless Rite will be useful at this point. Don't blow it out of proportion. It's just another way to know yourself. Evaluate whether you want to join an order. You should feel 70-30 in favor of NOT. But keep an open mind.
14. If you're monolingual, you need to acquire reading knowledge in a least one major magical language at this point (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Sanskrit, Arabic). If you speak something other than English, also investigate the magical heritage of that language, because every language is magical to some extent. It won't be hard to do if you've made it this far. Create magical workings in that language.
15. Begin study of the Heptameron, even if you dislike it at first glance. This is a challenge. You should already be proficient in either the Grimorium Verum or the Greater and Lesser Key of Solomon. Start building a legacy for yourself by creating a teaching program using Neoplatonic levels (the spiritual essence, the idea, the form, the manifestation). Take on a worthy student.
16. Write your magical autobiography to provide context for those who intend to follow a similar path.
Follow these steps and everything in your life will be transformed. Mostly, it will be for the better. Sometimes, it will be awful. And that's how it goes.