I believe you have a survivor's bias here – I have kind of the same track, I developed my initial skills while living with parents, being single and without having too much social interactions, so I was able to dedicate incredible amount of time to all this stuff.

But this is not always the case. Very often when you realize that you need to change something, you already work, and you have some obligations, so you have to keep up your work no matter what, and you might have not that much of energy in the evenings. Also, relationships can take a lot of energy from you as well, or you might just (surprise!) have another hobby, and you don't want to sacrifice it.

So, that's all can be broken as "not enough motivated", but seriously, does everybody want to change their life to become a top programmer? And this is even without mentioning that not everybody can develop skills (and create good-enough self branding to present it) to be able to be hired by Google, or other big corps, which will pay for your relocation.

The last point I want to say that it is very hard to develop yourself without understanding how -- a lot of people don't read HN, they think that people working in Google, FB, etc are some semigods, and people around them seem to agree about that -- it is like another bubble, where nobody knows how to actually get into this SV one.