You don't need to make something unique, if your goal is to learn.

The best thing you can do is to build something that solves a problem for you, or to build something that already exists that you know well.

As for money, given that companies seem to love layoffs lately, I would say that higher salaries only matter if you are employed. It's an employers market right now, and a lot of people are really struggling to find work again, even from large companies like Amazon and Google.

Learn finance and bookkeeping; work for a bank. Software development is not lucrative; the high-paying jobs are fundamentally tough and cause burnout. Median employment at big software companies is maybe 2-3yrs and it will ruin your ability to relate to other humans.

I try to keep an eye out for repetitive tasks that might make good projects. I just started a python script that's going to download all my google photos so i can free up my cloud storage.

Think of it more like problem solving. Plenty of jobs use software engineers just to code bespoke tools suited to exactly what they need. Someone else will tell you what it should do, you just have to translate that into code. The hard part is more figuring out what they really need/want because what they tell you isn't always what they want.

Be aware that learning to code is not a safe bet for making money in this market. Of course it's better to have coding skills on your resume than nothing. Coding also complements other white collar skills well (eg. program Macros in Excel or use Jupyter for bespoke data analysis). But code alone is unlikely to get you cash, in my opinion.

Sometimes motivation can make your better in forced way
Your case same like mine actually. in the end i forced to learn programming because it's digital era & everything will be digital at some point, at first i admit i suck at everything but as time goes on i can made something better and better

I still remembered the first time i forced my way i learned about programming world especially web dev 14 years ago. I learned WordPress, why i learned it ? because it can make website really really fast, it's high demand in my country (even today), you can make easy peasy money with it since my client doesn't care about what tools you used as long as the website is launch and meet their requirements, & it suits for client that have very tight budget