I got sick of doing the same thing 100+ times per day at work, so I wrote a little script and tied it to a keyboard shortcut. Then I wrote some more scripts to do more things. Then I wrote a web site to make and share more tools with the team, and it just kept going.
I had taken some programming in college, but it didn’t click at the time and I forgot it all. It wasn’t until I had something useful to do that I saw its real value.