Getting Started.
As a new miner your first goal should be getting skilled enough to at least yield 2 stones from using 1 pick axe, this gives you enough to make a Crafted Stone Pick, minus the wood, but since the minimum amount of lindens you can mine up using 1 pick is 3, and cost of a Tree Axe is also 3L, you can use a pick to get resources to be able to make another. It doesn’t take very long to get to this point. As you go on you’ll start having excess resources that you can sell or save to make excess picks to sell to other players.
The more skilled you become, the better your yields become and thus the cheaper you can sell your picks and still profit! I always recommend that new players start in the lumberjack profession first to get some agility before you start picking, this will start you off with much better yields for when you start picking rocks.