Comment by lmm

The three great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris. I picked up some skills from the first guy I worked with out of college (pair-programming is great), but more important than that was the attitude. Cultivate a sense for when you're doing something by hand that the computer should be able to do for you, then figure out (or ask someone) how to get the computer to do that. Keep doing that and in a few years what you do looks like magic to your previous self.