Ask HN: Wanting to become a programmerkeep running into problems

Hi all...Little bit of background. I am 43 years old and have been working as a sysadmin type person for the last few years. I have some scripting skills (bash, perl, python) that I acquired as part of my job. I do not have formal comp sci education.

I have been wanting to learn how to become a "decent" programmer with the following goals in mind to move towards on a _professional_ basis (aka make some money doing) - AI, machine learning, potentially game development.

Anyway, towards that end, I have been doing a bunch of research and tried a couple of things but keep running into issues. I have started MOOCs and never finished due to getting frustrated on the problem sets. Looked into Python (CS61A, MIT 6.001.x), Scheme (SPD1x)..tried going through SICP (got destroyed at the first chapter), HTDP2e (stopped again)...

Partially it is due to the lack of time to actually devote to psets, partially due to getting frustrated and giving up too early....probably I am not doing things too efficiently and all over the place... I find the problem sets too difficult at times and just get frustrated and start looking at other options which is I am guessing the crux of the issue.

Does anyone have any advice?