I've given up at many points over the last 9 years. I now program "professionally". I work on full stack web applications, networked desktop applications, and r

I've given up at many points over the last 9 years. I now program "professionally". I work on full stack web applications, networked desktop applications, and recently embedded applications. The primary reason I gave up was that I wasn't willing to accept the amount of effort which needed to be put in to get the level of results that I wanted. I just couldn't comprehend that the skills I wanted to have required years of commitment. The advice that I'd give would be to understand that this is a huge task. You won't learn everything quickly; even if you're very bright; even if you spend 14 hours a day on it. Those things will help, but they aren't the key. If you want to be a good programmer you need to love learning. It's not about being clever, it's about being persistent. You constantly need to learn new tools and frameworks, and occasionally new languages. You need to understand the technologies you're interacting with and how they work. And you need to take all those tools, frameworks, languages, and technologies and use them daily. But mostly you need to invest the time. Don't give up if you let a big project go because it's too difficult, or don't understand something, or spend two weeks on something you thought would take an hour. Be disappointed, sure. But don't quit. Keep going. Keep learning. Keep on picking up just a small amount of knowledge or skill each day. In a year things that now seem complex will be obvious. And that will happen again and again every year that you continue learning. Eventually, your failed projects will turn into completed projects, but it could take years for this to start happening depending on how ambitious the projects were. You can't let that stop you. You just have to keep going despite it. So keep going. But realize it's a long, slow, life-time commitment to constant learning. It's not easy. Even if you've been good at everything else in life, there's no exception for you. Mastery and skill will only come with significant time and effort. But they will come. Also learn vim. That sh*t is awesome.