I am still a beginner programmer myself, but I do have a couple small projects under my belt. If you happen to have an office job, I would recommend trying to automate anything you do that involves copying information from one source to another. We have many different systems here and they do not communicate, i.e. our complaint database and our POS. I've made programs that make it so I don't have to retype information over and over again. My next project is to make it so that certain weird text documents are easier to read by exporting them to a excel document.

This solution doesn't work for everyone, as some of us don't work at computers. But, if you can find a way to automate anything that you do, whether at home or at work, you'll have a good project to work on.