Struggling to move past the 'tutorial hell' phase. How did you guys actually start building stuff on your own?

I've been following various courses on Udemy and YouTube for about four months now. I feel like I understand the syntax—I can write a loop, I get how dictionaries work, and I can wrap my head around basic functions—but the second I open a blank VS Code window to start a project from scratch, my mind goes completely blank.

I try to think of something useful, but everything I come up with feels either too simple (like a calculator) or way too overwhelming (like a full-scale web scraper or a bot). I keep falling back into watching someone else code because it's easier to follow a roadmap than to figure out the architecture myself.

For those of you who transitioned from following tutorials to actually being able to build independent projects, what was that turning point for you? Did you just force yourself to build something broken and fix it, or did you follow a specific methodology to bridge the gap between 'knowing the syntax' and 'knowing how to build'? I feel like I'm stuck in this loop where I'm consuming content but not actually retaining the ability to problem-solve. Any advice on how to pick a project that is challenging enough to teach me something new without making me want to quit entirely would be huge.