Aspiring real estate investor education

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HI, 

I am an aspiring real estate investor. I work a full-time career in healthcare as a nurse practitioner. While it supports my family and I with comfortable living, I am looking to build wealth passively to replace income so that I can enjoy my time with family while youthful instead of working my life away only to retire at old age with inevitable declining physical and functional capacity. Besides operating expenses, the only debt I owe is a mortgage. My plan currently consists of daily reading, podcasts, forums, saving cash for reserves and to fund my first deal cash (or mostly cash). I am currently enrolled in an MBA program; however, I am not motivated the way I was when I initially began as I had aspirations to pursue managment and clinical leadership roles. I am very much considering quitting (at least for now) it as I do not realize the value it will bring me with investing in real estate, and I am not motivated to continue it because of those thoughts. At this time, I am focused on saving and education prior to making my initial investment in single family homes as a start. I have about 1-2 years before I will be ready to make a move and want to use this time to best equip myself with knowledge and tools that will increase my success. What would be the most valuable educational opportunity besides readings, podcasting, reading forums; I was thinking about pursuing a residential real estate appraiser license in the meantime? I figure this would help me be able to make the right offers on deals, in addition to estimating ARV's for BRRRR deals that I am interested in pursuing. I also see it being beneficial for me by learning the local RE markets I want to begin investing in. I have some time in the evenings and weekends to devote as well as ~3% of income to use for educational purposes. I just want to make the wisest use of my time preparing in order to help increase my chances of success and returns when I pull the trigger. ANY advice from other experienced investors or people in similar situations or anyone?