In the beginning of my programming journey, I just like the idea of becoming a programmer.
I thought it was super intelligent and powerful prestigious profession that can do all sorts of things. You were no longer tied to doing a monotonous job.
I struggled learning it.
Not until I reached the end of first year of college did I realize it is OK as long as I am interested.
Doing tutorials and exercises did not really help. I learned a lot more by creating my own stuff with my friends.
Googling for help was hard at first. Looking at StackOverflow.com was headachy. There were more than one solution mostly and the code was written usually in a different language (C#) than beginner Visual Basics that I was using at the time.