It takes 10 hours a day, seven days a week, and two years of computer time to get good at programming. For a bootstrapper, it is that, and everything else.
I didn't choose the startup life, the startup life found me.
I was 17, sitting on the cold hard prison floor and bawling my eyes out when I decided that if I was good enough to write a trojan that went around the world, surely I can build a great business.
I have nothing but a good brain to work with and a trained discipline of the special forces. (I was in the Naval Divers). With that, I started work on working my way up the bootstrapper's hierachy of needs.
The Bootstrapper's hierarchy of needs sounds like common sense, but I have met far too many other bootstrappers who got too cocky on the plausible success of their startup and decided they can skip out on building up the foundation for their personal life.