That's a hard question to answer. There were a combination of motives and opportunities. Motives were things like a strong desire to prove myself combined with an anger at the lob sided salaries.

Opportunities were a major application that was written so badly (in java) that I learned a lot by fixing and refactoring. A poor social life that came from a divorce and moving states gave me an opportunity to spend an additional 40+ hours a week after work coding and experimenting and seeing what I could do.

In a more general sense. Giving myself a goal and working on figuring out how to achieve it in code was far better for me then merely reading a text.