Great topic, Tonker
Start early, if you can--piloting needs to become part of you, like breathing. Trite, but after 30+ years, it is a life, not a job.
I solo'd on my 16th birthday, Dad helped, then said, it's your's now. I worked at an FBO, using my wages to pay for training. It was easier then, gas was .50 cents a gallon and a PA-28 cost, with employee discount, about $20 an hour. Inflation and bank debt has run the prices out of control.
Get a college degree and learn something that is useful, aviation studies isn't a degree, economics, business management, a science or engineering is. It doesn't have to be from Harvard, but my business degree helped me innumerable times, if only to understand this wacky business. You might need the education, if things don't work out.
I did own, with a partner, an Aeronca Champ to build time. It cost us $1,000 a piece, flew it a lot and learned a lot. It was in Trade-a-Plane a couple of years ago for $30,000. Selling it for what we had in it was a mistake.
Then, I met a life-long friend in an ANG unit, was selected 2 years later to go to UPT and fly the F-100. There is still no better training than the military, don't dismiss it. I paid the AF back by being able to select and send 20+ young men and two women to go to UPT. Research the Reserves, the best combination, but AD is certainly excellent, my nephew is USN pilot on his first cruise.
Don't get fixated on one track--life is not a dress rehearsal. Being an airline pilot is a fine goal and career, but variety has a value all it's own. I have been an airline pilot (Eastern, gone in '89), flew night checks, corporate, fighters (F-100 and A-10), full-time military airlift (C-5) and now corporate (sort of) again. I enjoyed everyday of it, even if only about a 1000 days of it was spent at my original goal--the airlines.
GF