I taught myself to code at the age of 22 and I am not a math genius by any means. I feel like I'm getting pretty good at it (almost 24 now).
The biggest thing to remember is to have a real problem you're trying to solve with programming. Just going through tutorials isn't going to teach you how to program. And then Google until you figure it out. I found it works best to get something functioning, and then go back and read the documentation or book about why it works how it does.
In my case, I started a company and didn't have the money (or desire) to find a developer to work with. So I sat in front of my computer and struggled through it. I had an actual problem that I wanted to solve.
I most likely count as a technical person, but I couldn't resist weighing in. One key factor when I've been learning something programming-related has been to actually deal with problems that I need to solve.
If you're currently puting reports together by hand, see if you can write a bit of code to do the repetitive part. If you need to filter a stream of articles, see if you can weed out the easy 80% using word matching, or some other heuristic you develop. If you have a spreadsheet to do your budgetting, see if you can replace it with a program that can fetch all the available data, and spit out relevant results.
Very true, though it would help a lot if the need to solve something is driven by an innate interest, curiosity or simple laziness to do repetitive work (so as to pursue more interesting things).
Monetary motivations don't really count. No doubt it helps, but it won't compel or make you strive to become a better programmer or make something truly great.
