I was stuck in the perpetual 'hello world' phase for a long time myself
Then I jumped onto a freelance site and bid on a couple jobs
Once you actually get a 'paying' gig and complete it you realize you can do it.
Start with something smallish , a little $20 project - I started with simple scraping stuff (PHP)
I got pretty good with multi-curl / proxies (scraping 1000 pages / sec )
I'm trying to learn game dev / 3d stuff - that's a whole different world LOL
Hmm. Not a bad suggestion. So just jump in and accept being out my depth for a bit, eh? Well, if that's what gets results I'm game.