The one thing I've figured out over the years is to not make your goal be "be great at coding". That's an ambiguous goal, and it's easy to move the goalposts on

The one thing I've figured out over the years is to not make your goal be "be great at coding". That's an ambiguous goal, and it's easy to move the goalposts on that one. I find that that kind of goal encourages a narrow, syllabus-y definition of learning that doesn't encourage the kind of trial-and-error that's crucial to grokking the difficult parts of programming. Instead just learn how to solve your actual problems or entertain yourself using programming /today/. Making your friends websites, making games for / with your kids, making an app to water your plants, making spreadsheets to manage your finances, automating that annoying manual thing you do at work, making goofy software that converts images to pixel art, whatever floats your boat. You have to make a lot of bad things to start making good things. So start making bad things, and enjoy it while you're at it - I've made my fair share. Do a little bit of programming every day. Do it for now, and not for later. Set yourself a direction every so often, but not much more than that. Review your own work and see what was not great, and figure out what to learn next to make it better. Show your work to other people and ask them for help, or enjoy together. It's much more pleasant to look back later and continually be surprised how far you've come.