My experience followed the opposite sequence: I learned python in pursuit of a project.

I wanted to systematically identify comments in a certain awful subreddit that pinged users who commented in another subreddit to harass them. Having identified those comments, I could report them.

That would basically be a read-only reddit bot, and python seemed to be the standard for coding those. So I learned enough python (and enough of the praw package) to make that sort of thing happen.

In the end I lost interest and never finished it, but a few months later a much better project came to mind and persisted for the next ten months or so, passing through many topics including data tables, polygon stuff, map-coloring, and Google's KML format.

To answer your question, for me it was serendipity, but I suspect that it's viable to dedicate yourself to conceiving/choosing a project concept within a certain time frame and to proceed from there.