My best advice for anyone like myself is to create real projects, try to create something that scratches an itch, something that can be sold etc.

For me this is my motivation: if I was doing it only for the sake of learning it I'd give up in a day.

Of course most of my inventions had fairly short shelf life if aby but I learned to program, well enough to get a well paid job. (And: one of these projects went ahead to save hours at a small company and another simplified procedures significantly at a local non-profit : )