I had a similar experience, but from a slightly different perspective. I always found programming for the sake of programming to be sufficient motivation to spend time writing code. But when it comes to learning math, I have a really hard time caring about math in the abstract. Sitting me in a math class and having me memorize equations and formulas and operations, and solve a few word problems here and there (two boats leave point A, one going west, one going east, after one hour, blah, blah, blah) leaves me bored shitless for the most part. But if I have an application that matters to me, for the math I'm learning, I'm FAR more interested and willing to put in the time to learn the stuff.

Now that I'm trying to get deeper into Machine Learning stuff, I find myself motivated to go pick up books on Statistics and Linear Algebra and dig in, when I had very little interest in that stuff before.