How can such a vague question have a precise answer?
It all depends.
Why are you even thinking about the years? It is irrelevant. Just do the work that excites you and stop looking at the clock. You are already great just by working on minor things that will make you great, like reading a book. If you are reading the right book, you are being great, today!
You guys seriously need to start enjoying your work. There is no magic destination that will make you happy. The happiness is in the journey. Work slower and savor your work. Stop fantasizing about future greatness. Just be great today!

1) Enjoy the work itself.
2) Enjoy working towards a larger vision.
You don't need to be at the goal to enjoy moving towards it. Being at the goal doesn't in itself produce enjoyment.
Just because you have mastered a skill doesn't mean you are living in pleasure. Having a skill is no different than having a Ferrari. It doesn't make you happy just owning it. The joy comes from doing it, from the journey, not the destination.
Example: If your goal is to become a doctor, you can enjoy reading a book which moves you towards that goal today. You don't have to wait until you are a doctor to start feeling good.

Yes. 2 years ago during my long break from the channel I had to give up my life purpose and all the meaning I created.
Of course meaning isn't bulletproof. You can lose it. But you can also create new, higher orders of meaning, and you can drop meaning altogether and ground yourself in the Being of God.
Really, you want both.
If you work on creating ambitious projects that align with your top values, you will hardly ever run out of meaning.

Your expectations are just wrong.
It doesn't work that way for anyone. Even talented people work their asses off to train to be great and to perform.
Modern culture has spoiled you with an entitled attitude. You expect life to be too easy. Life has never been that easy. That is some Hollywood/Disney-spun fantasy.
Everything great requires deep patience, hard work, and long term investment.
Even just having a child is a 20-year investment. Even after 20 years of life that child will still be a fool.
You need an attitude change and a strong work ethic.
Even if you had the skill it would still be lots of work. I have the skill of speaking, but each new video still requires lots of work. Great work cannot be effortless.
Meaning and satisfaction comes from working hard and investing in yourself every day. Anything effortless isn't meaningful. It is meaningful because of how much you had to work to develop it. So pick a domain and start investing. You don't need to wait for years to feel good about yourself. You can start feeling good now, just knowing you're training hard and investing.

Cut out distractions and limit your information intake.
Spending time in nature, going on walks, and meditating are all good disciplines. Some people like to journal. Cleaning the house is a good one for me, anything movement oriented. Doodle, listen to music, pet the cats in your neighborhood. Go to museums, concerts. Get good sleep. Talk to interesting people. Stay offline. Stay away from nicotine and alcohol. Eat healthy. Go on adventures once and a while. Do shit that scares you.
I'm my most creative when I spend two hours a day working out and meditating (calming meditation). That is my foundation.

I think intuition is a big key in identifying who to listen to. You will get a general feeling about it but then how do you know whether to listen to that feeling lol.
Theres no way of getting around the fact that there is no ground to stand on that assures you finding the correct people to listen to. But some general principles of people that are good signs are that they are;
- dynamic and flexible psychologically (and physically) as well as verbally articulate.
- loving (doesn't necessarily mean gentle)
- accurate with small things
- specific, analytical, investigative, explorative.
- humble (self sacrificing for the benefit of others).
- generally advanced and insightful.
- powerful, hitting critical areas of utmost pertinence to the matter at hand.
- innovate, inventive, creative.
- intelligent (highly informed)
- spiritual.
- reasonable, logical and also transcendental of reason and logic.
Ideally you want someone who hits multiple of these different characteristics. 
 
Bonus insight: Just because someone is truthful, doesn't mean they are correct.

@Thought Art You are not trusting enough that the mind will figure it out along the way.
You are introducing formality which isn't necessary.
As if the mind is so stupid that it won't understand that "tion" is pronounced "shun" while memorizing words.
If the mind worked like that we would all be retarded.

As if the Chinese struggle with pronouncing kanji.
Bitch,.pleeeease.
The real reason kids are illitllrate is because they are lazy and the schooling system is not strict enough to beat the laziness out of them.
You want to teach kids to read? You beat them with a stick if they don't do their homework. American kids have becone so goddamn entitled they are too lazy to learn. Proper education requires drillmaster to whip you into shape.
I'm serious, skip all the crap and just start memorizing whole words. Your rate of learning will skyrocket.

Yeah, I saw that recently.
People are getting so lazy they are too lazy to learn to read.
They are still teaching English wrong. The right way to learn English is to memorize every single word the way Chinese memorize their kanji.
English words are just kanji made of letters.
Memorize 5,000 words and you will know English.
You can't sound out English words because English spelling is nonsensical.

(screenshot)

Personal development work has crippled my survival for the first 10 years. Only now after tons of work and insight can I use it to imporve my survival.
In the beginning I was just odd, talking odd stuff, being non-conformist, not realizing others don't get my way of being, not realizing most women are not into my nerdy shit, not realizing MOST people like 95% plus are NOT interested in serious development. Only now after so much fking time did I realize that I have to treat most people like children. Because they are children. Most people don't do this work because it cripples your survival a lot. it takes tons of work until this work goes full circle and actually improves your survival. It sounds cynical but the problem was I wasn't cynical enough. I hoped that people will be in awe of my insights, they were not.

How To Get Shit Done
How Be A Strategic Motherfucker
Advice For Small Business Owners
Advice For Ambitious People
How To Escape Wage Slavery
- - - - - 
I will make a video on the foundations of success.

@Thought Art That's why we gotta keep things funny.
Existential humor is key to all this.

Story of my life. I wish someone would have warned me properly about how much suffering real spiritual work causes before I started the journey. The opposite was sold actually.
Either ways I would have probably done this work anyways but just having proper expectations would have made this journey much more smoother.

Aversion to death
"Thoughts"
Identity, period, not specific identities, just identity
Mowed lawns
Brushing your teeth and showering in a room with a toilet
Preparing food in a room with a trash can
Sleeping on a pillow
Different clothes every day
Deodorant
Sleeping at night and eight straight hours
Refrigerators
Air conditioning
Travel
Holding in farts
Toilet paper vs bidet
Plastic grocery bags
Wearing shoes, and clothes.... 
Jogging
Not just gym bro culture, but going to the gym

I took guitar lessons for about about a year or so and then I spent the next 15 years just improvising every time I play. If you ask me to play a song, I will actually struggle to find one I can remember in its entirety (although I learned essentially Metallica's whole discography the first year or so, then some Opeth, Tool and Death songs, but really, so few songs).
I remember one of my cousins (he is much older) came to visit at my dad's place back when I had been playing for like two years or so. I showed a song that I had made as an assignment in music class, and it was some kind of metalcore-inspired song where I took elements from a blues progression I had learned from my guitar teacher and integrated it with something that sounded like a rip-off from some Bullet For My Valentine song.
But in the middle of the main riff, I went from an E-scale to an A-scale, and my cousin who is a math nerd and classically trained musician (and on the spectrum), told me "yeah that was very wrong, but it sounds cool 😅". And my dad was like "hey ". And internally I was like "but teach me then". After that, I developed a severe complex around whether or not I was playing music "properly" (in terms of Western music theory), and it took like seriously 10 years before I realized that all my musical idols essentially didn't give a shit about that and just played whatever they thought sounded cool.

Roller Coaster Conformity Study
(shoutout to my ketamine/5-MeO therapist for this example)

A study with 12 participants examined how social framing influences subjective experience.

Method:

Participants were randomly divided into two groups before riding a roller coaster:
    •    Group A (n=6): Told beforehand the ride was “scary”
    •    Group B (n=6): Told beforehand the ride was “fun”

Results:

Post-ride surveys revealed participants’ reported experiences aligned with their priming:
    •    Group A reported negative experiences
    •    Group B reported positive experiences

Conclusion:

This demonstrates how external framing and social suggestion can shape our interpretation of identical physical experiences—a clear example of conformity influencing perception. Same ride, different experience.

Forums are actually under-utilized these days.
People who don't use forums are more conformist.
A good forum is a powerful tool that most people have no clue exists.

University system with credit points  biggest conformity I have fallen into. I have two complete degrees, a master in economics and diploma in computer science.
I can just laught at me how serious I took these systems for granted. Only at the end I realized more and more what's going on. What a waste of life but I would just play computer games instead. The second biggest conformity I have fallen into.
You need to be a conformist to do them. Especially video games.

Yes you can, I do that.
In my work breaks, I watch through the window and contemplate the imaginary nature of Reality and its raw beauty. I love watching the leaves moving and the trees breathing.
If anything I've learnt in life is that human development and Awakening are the best combo. If you put all your points there, it gives the greatest returns and synergies. 

@Husseinisdoingfine You are taking university way too seriously. It's really not important as you tell yourself it is.
All this situation means is that you are not cut out for that kind of high academic work. That's okay. The problem here is that you keep trying to succeed in a field that you are not naturally well-suited for. You need to sit down, accept that, and find a new field that isn't heavy on math and hard science. That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. You will be much happier once you switch careers. You are too attached to that one career field.
Do not kill yourself over this issue.
I switched my major from out of enginnering after years of study because I realized engineering was a bad fit for my personality. Imagine if I killed myself instead. That would be silly.
Throw away your rope right now.
You will never need it. Just sit down and accept the pain that engineering is now right for you. There's no shame in that. There are much better fields than engineering.
Throw away your rope.
Switching to a career that suits you better does not make you a loser, it makes you wise.
Happiness awaits you once you just accept that you don't need any of this engineering stuff or academics to be happy and successful. Academia is an illusion. Certainly not worth killing yourself over.

There is nothing wrong with working a simple job. Billions of people do it and find happiness.
Many successful people started out with very basic jobs. Or even homeless.

If you want to be a bum there is no normative argument against it.
However, survival requires work no matter what. By choosing to be a bum you will suffer the consequences of that and so will society at large.
Being creative and hard working is necessary to live in a beautiful world. Otherwise you live like a bum in a shithole. If you want to live in a shithole house, city, society -- okay, go ahead. But I will not be joining you.
Having wealth means you are not a burden on others and you have the means to help others better their situations.
A bum inevitably becomes a leech on others around him, leeching off their labor. So it is not an integrous way to live.
I had a choice. I could have been a bum, or I could be creative and hard working and create Actualized.org. If I chose to be a bum then none of this would exist. Instead of helping people self-actualize I would have been a leech on others.
It all comes down to the question of: How do you want to live?
There are no objectively right or wrong answers to that question. But however you chose to live, there will be serious consequences.

This is a bad scarcity mindset.
Wealth isn't bad, it's good. Just earn it through legitimate creative work rather than scams.
You should have way more wealth than to pay your expenses. You should be so productive and creative that you earn millions. This means you've made yourself useful to the world.

Yeah, kindness isn't real because you're looking for it from people, instead ,realize what's better than kindness, Inside of you, the source that loves you more than your mother just seek it and it will come to you.