I tried many times to learn programming in the internet (Coursera, Udemy, YouTube, CodeAcademy, etc) and I was never successful. I always managed to get a few l

I tried many times to learn programming in the internet (Coursera, Udemy, YouTube, CodeAcademy, etc) and I was never successful. I always managed to get a few lessons and things strat getting complicated and I drop. Two year ago, a family member, who have a very small charity institution, and all the income/outcome was written up in a notebook, ask me if I can digitalize the accounting. The simple solution was a Excel sheet and done, but this person is very bad with technology, so I was afraid that he would move something in the excel and everything would be messed up. So I build with Google sheets, google sites and Google forms a very simple web application to record incomes and outcomes. Once I did that I start working with Google App Script in order to automatically send emails with invoices and reminders. At the beginning I didn't had a clue of what I was doing, just copy and paste code from the internet into Google App Script, and following YouTube videos step by step. (Google app Script is a cloud environment where you can run JavaScript code and connect to Google products via API) With a few experiments I start understanding what's going on. I was very satisfied with the result and start looking for other things to do and automate. With the time I start involving html and JavaScript client side code. I became pretty good in those things, and all my learning was basically looking in W3 school and stack overflow every time that I needed to do something new. I did a few web applications like this. When one of my friends ask me if I can help him with some automation and was willing to pay 500usd for something that took me an hour, that rang my bells and I realized that I have something with great potential in hands. To make long story short, eventually I quit my job and start making custom software for small companies. Today I have about 10 softwares that my customers use an daily basis and overall they are pretty happy with my work. The big lesson that I learned: it's very hard to learn something new if you don't have a clear purpose for it's application, and for that reason it was always very difficult for me to learn how to code, until I needed to solve specific problems. (Or the other way to learn is to be in the right environment (collage) where the specific goal is to not leg behind)