I strongly disagree with the approaches usually recommended online, which involve some mixture of sites like CodeAcademy and looking into open source projects and lots of other hard-to-motivate things. Maybe my brain works differently, but those never appealed to me. I can't do book learning and I can't make myself up and dedicate to something I'm not drawn to already. If you're similar, try this instead:

1. Pick a thing that you have no idea how to make.
2. Try to make it.

Now, when I say "try"... new programmers often envision just sitting down and writing, but when they try it they realize they have no idea how to do anything. Their mistake is that, actually, sitting down and knowing what to do is just not what coding is like. I always surprise people who are learning to code with this fact: when I'm writing code in any language other than my main ones (Java, mostly..), I google something approximately once every two minutes. I spend most of my time searching for how to do even the most basic things. When it's time to actually make something work, it's usually just a few minutes of coding after much more time spent learning.

You should try to make the "minimum viable product" of whatever you want to make first.

If it's a game, get a screen showing - try to do it in less than an hour. Don't get sidetracked by anything else; get the screen up. Then get a character moving with arrow keys. Don't touch anything until you have a baseline you can iterate on, because every change you make should be immediately reflected in the product. Until you can see quick results from your hard work you're not going to get sucked in.

If it's a website or a product, get the server running in less than an hour. Pick a framework and a platform and go - don't get caught on the details. Setting up websites is secretly easy (python -m SimpleHTTPServer !) but if you've never done it you won't know that. If you need one set up a database right after. Get started quickly. It's possible with almost every architecture if you just search for cheat sheets and quick-start guides and stuff. You can fix your mistakes later, or start again if something goes wrong.

If you do something tedious, automate it. I have a shell script that copies some Javascript libraries and Html/JS templates into a new Dropbox folder and starts a server running there so I can go from naming my project to having an iterable prototype with some common elements I always reuse in less than five minutes. That gets me off the ground much faster and in less than 50 lines of script.

If you like algorithms or math or whatever, sure, do Project Euler or join TopCoder - those are fun. The competition will inspire some people to be fantastic at coding, which is great. I never got sucked in for some reason, even though I'm really competitive.

If you use open source stuff, sure, take a look at that. I'm only motivated to fix things that I find lacking in tools that I use, which in practice has never lead to my contributing to open source. Rather I find myself making clones of closed software so I can add features to it..

Oh, and start using Git early on. It's pretty great. Github is neat too and it basically acts as a resume if you go into programming, which is neat. But remember - setting it up is secretly easy, even if you have no idea what you're doing. Somehow things you don't understand are off-putting until you look back and realize how simple they were.

Hmm, that's all that comes to mind for now. Hope it helps.