A time will come when you won't even be bothered about earning merits and that's only if you chill, become contributive, learn more and be determined to grow gradually. It doesn't matter how long it will take you to grow but the most important thing is for you to understand how the forum works and stay put to discussions in relevant threads and boards. There are enough merit source who can come across your quality posts and give them merits even if they are posts you made in the past.

There is no need for newbie to have a startup merit because it makes no difference since it will still depend on your activity that will make your rank to increase with the number of merit you have been able to earn. We all started with zero merits but here we are now having enough of it in our profiles.