Yes, I know you can't really "win" at Glitch--the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Still, here are my best recommendations for newbies. (I've been here since early alpha, and have had my character reset several times in alpha and beta, so I have a lot of experience starting over.)
Some of these recommendations will be controversial. Feel free to ignore those which don't suit your particular type of gameplay.
1) Forget learning ANY cooking, cocktail crafting, etc. skill. They are fairly useless and because there are so many of them, they bump up your skill learning time for other skills. To get food easily, unlock Gardening 1, 2, and 3 and harvest from Egg Plants. By the time you are at Gardening 3, you can harvest 2x each game day (every 4 hours) and get 12 eggs per harvest. You will never go hungry.
As for mood, as your gardening skill increases, you will be able to get drinks from harvesting, petting, and watering plants. Helga over in West Spice also sells them. Keep a stock of them and also learn Meditation to increase your mood.
You can learn these "easy"/quick skills later, when you've already learned the longest skills (see below).
2) Learn the skills that take the longest first, so you don't end up taking forever to learn them later (as the time to learn a new skill increases with every skill you learn.) Currently, the two longest skills in the game are Mining 4 and Better Learning 5. Learn these two as soon as possible. It's worth it.
3) Learn Intermediate Admixing. It's useful to craft Extremely Hallowed Shrine Powder, or EHSP. More on this in a bit.
4) Learn to use the game days wisely. Every four hours, log in and use all your energy. I commonly use a quick login during the day to refine ore, for instance, as that uses a lot of energy. This is also a good time to repair your tools.
5) ***IMPORTANT TRICK*** When you have more time, craft items to donate to shrines. Then, every 4 hours, log in and donate the maximum you can to the shrine of the Primary Giant of the skill you are learning right now. This does two things: 1) It gets you a ton of XP and helps you level quickly without "grinding". 2) It helps you speed up your skills massively, so you can learn everything faster.
6) Use EHSP to help increase the power of your donations. An item is worth 10% of its value in favor points, so an item worth 1000 currants is worth 100 favor points. EHSP multiplies favor points by 3, so suddenly your 1000-currant item is worth 300 favor points instead of 100. This will help you get to your max donation limit faster. And remember, that donation limit is per GAME day, so logging in every 4 hours is critical.
Currently, I'm on pace to learn every skill in the game in the next 2-3 weeks (depending on whether I keep up this every-4-hours thing...some days I'm more motivated than others.)