In the beginning of Hillegass's book, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, he has a great quote of someone from Caltech being asked about the real world usefulness of a degree in astrophysics.  His response was "Not much, but if I run into a hard problem and start thinking I must be stupid because I can't figure this out, then I remember I have a degree in astrophysics so I am not stupid and this must be hard. So in that way it is useful." I'm paraphrasing (the book is buried somewhere) but that always stuck and your post reminded me how important it is to keep at it because coding is not easy, but it is worth it.