One of the first small projects I worked on when i was starting with python was a telegram birthday reminder bot as i really didn’t want to rely on Facebook for that. At first I was just looping over all the entries in a list, then went to a database, at some point added fuzzy search, adding and removing entries. Still use it today.

Imo the best way to learn is to think of a project that you personally find useful and need solved for yourself, not some abstract exercise.