Aha, an interesting thread! It's always great to learn how others did it.
I'm not going to write my life story but here are the key steps I took.
Age 11: Qbasic writing games. Pointed to QB by my step dad, learnt it by his guidance and the internet.
Age 11: Messing around with adobe pagemill to make a basic webpage. Never launched anything.
Age 13ish: Messing with pages on geocities. Still using Qbasic. Learning everything from searching the web.
Age 15ish: Moved to visual basic 6 building directX 2D strategy map builders. Never got past the map builder apps but had some wicked simulated trees and terrain lol. Still using the net to learn (just Googling specific things).
Age 15ish: Playing around with photoshop, milkshape 3D, blender 3D, 3D studio, Dark Basic
17ish: 3D studio, learning by doing and some www tutorials. Sidelined programming and www.
19ish: Boss picked up on IT skills and 'commissioned' me to learn how to build an app he wanted. Used the web to learn MS Access (shame)
19ish: Boss paid me to develop website. At this stage was learning Visual Basic .NET for the web, learning from Googling and just doing it.
21ish: Learning everything from this stage onwards by Google including WPF, VB.Net, C#.Net, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Jquery, SQL, and so on.
Key theme here is I just 'googled' everything I needed to know. I would think of a project and create the project, design the first form or page or whatever and at every stage when I got stuck I'd Google a way around it.
Occasionally following some tutorials of course! And learning lots of good stuff from many forum threads.