Your reply remind me of the situation I was in little over a year ago. Based on my own experiences going through trying to learn to code, a few comments: "In t

Your reply remind me of the situation I was in little over a year ago. Based on my own experiences going through trying to learn to code, a few comments: "In the end, I really want to learn how to code" No, in the end you want to learn how to solve problems. If you start with a problem and try to learn the minimal of whatever coding/ language/ package/ software is required to solve the problem, you will be much further ahead. At this stage, don't worry about being efficient or writing the best code. Now, I laugh at the SQL queries that I wrote a year ago but they did solve the problem. Over time, I learnt to write much better queries. "I always stopped short of achieving my goal" This is because it was your goal and on not achieving the goal you gave yourself a pass. You will be better off solving a problem for someone else for whom you care and you will be embarrassed if you didn't solve the problem, like for your spouse, kids, parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, boss, neighbor. Also, achieving small victories are important for continued interest. Little over a year ago I was jumping around between Ruby, Java, Python, HTML, CSS, JS, SQL, R never finished learning or using any of them until my wife asked me to automate a manual process for her. I started out with solving her problem and learning enough of the languages that will quickly solve the parts of the problem. In the end, I learnt enough of mySQL, PHP, and Bootstrap to deliver a complete solution to her problem. There was enough fear of failure and being embarrassed that I delivered a complete solution, however rough, to her. Since then I have modified and extended the solution and now it is being used by another 1,000 users, still it is an ugly piece of work. But I am much more satisfied and encouraged to continue learning and improving.