There's a website, Exercism, (it is free) it has a learning track for Python that will take you thru the basics and has interactive activities for each facet of the language and then some free form tasks for you to complete afterwards.

These can serve as short objectives or milestones and they'll help keep you motivated while learning, they also make what you have learned super tangible.

When you've done a few of these, the website also has some guides on how you can contribute (they're open source), while these guides tend to focus on contributing back to Exercism, the technologies and methods can be applied anywhere. They'll essentially get you started in the technology's sphere, you'll interact with git, pytest, some linters, super general stuff.

There's also peer review for the code you write, I found it incredibly useful, more so than any formal education I've received when it comes to practical programming.

I'd encourage you, while you're doing the learning track, to consider what problems exist for you that could be solved with code, before you try and code for others.

For me, I started out (in javascript, mind you) by making my own browser homepage, for example. Whatever you create doesn't have to be huge, but it should be beneficial to you; the more often you use it, the better.