My Tandy 1000 came with a DOS 2.2 Manual and a Microstf Basic programing book. My school also had TRS-80's when I was in the 3rd grade on up. They taught a cool drawing program called snake, and had district wide contests (was fun and competitive).
Later, I ran a BBS for kids, because I was tired of the must be 18 BBS's that existed. Because kids should be able to play Legend of the Red Dragon. I learned some BBS stuff from an older guy I knew from Bowling. My DOS skills came in handy with batch files for BBS.
Then I went to community college and got a job as a lab assistant. Which allowed me to sit in any class I wanted, mainly I worked the NT 3.51 Workstation and Server classes and the Novell 3.12 classes.
Then I got my start as a peon at a medium sized company. After 3 months I had learned the things college doesn't teach, like routers, firewalls, switches. After a 1 1/2 yrs of working as a network admin I finally got the title. Another couple years became a Sr. Network Admin, and security became an issue. After focusing on security for a few years I got the title of Network Security Admin, same job different title.
I'll be starting a new job shortly with an even better title.

Things to help you learn.
Make goals of different things for yourself to learn, put a lot of things on the list and if you learn half you're doing good. When you are updating your list later, add some of the things you removed because they were hard to understand and see if the second time helps.
If you wonder how something works....figure it out.
Learn things that will help you now, things that you can't use right away you'll be more likely to forget. If you no longer have to work on something and are afraid you'll forget it, hone the skill during your free time.
Remember to keep everything in context on how things work together. If you can't understand the total picture it makes fixing it or knowing how to protect it hard.
Books are nice, if you can afford them. Conferences are cool. Free siminars are good for eating.


Just like in all things, if you do not enjoy doing it, you will probably not be good at it. If you like doing it and are willing to sacrafice your free time, you will be really good at it.