For me what helped a lot was finally gaining friends (at 21) with similar interests (and by then I finally had my own computer to mess with). Before that I was messing with our family dos/windows computers but in university a friend gave me a Mandrake Linux CD and that finally made things click for me, soon after I got Apache working and proudly showed my father my self hosted website… and then I emailed the adres (10.0.0.21 or so) to all my friends and quickly learned another thing or 2 about networking (10.0.x.x addresses are local and sharing them over the internet makes no sense :)). Before that I was all on my own, of course this was when the internet was just coming up, no YouTube etc. IMHO there is no real substitute for a group of like minded individuals to Learn from and to get motivated by. That, and it helped that my father didn’t get angry when I bricked our modem telnetting into it (some 25 years ago) to let my friends see that website as well.

I think nowadays Raspberry Pi’s are just great, so much power and freedom for 35 eur. I was always afraid to mess with our home computer (back in the day we had 1 for the family with a family email address), but Raspbery Pi’s, man I’d keep throwing them at my kids if they were interested.