Ask HN: How do you get over a lack of ambition?

Okay, here's the deal. I'm looking to get better at programming, as well to learn various popular Javascript frameworks through a side project or something. That's because the market seems to be more interested in that side at the moment, and in part because I want to move on from WordPress and PHP related work.

So I thought I'd get better through a few side projects.

Problem is, I'm having trouble thinking of anything that requires me to learn the programming languages and frameworks I want to learn. Almost every idea I have for a side project is the kind of thing any programmer could create in PHP/Perl/Python/whatever with minimal effort.

For instance, I'm currently rebuilding my gaming news site and it's going okay, but there's absolutely nothing there that would require me to learn anything new. The site concept is simply getting basic stuff from a database.

Same goes with other projects. I want to create a marketplace for game developers, but that doesn't require anything ambitious either. Again, the idea is interesting to me, but the technology required is super simple.

And that's the case with everything I want to build. It's just so simple in its requirements I don't feel I have the opportunity to learn anything.

I could theoretically just try and complicate a simple project with whatever framework I'm learning at the moment, but something in my mind just says that's a bad idea. I just find it near impossible to do something in a complicated way when a simple one works fine.

I also find it difficult to just come up with an idea knowing others might not use it. So I struggle to create anything that I can't find a way to market.

Any ideas how to fix this? How to think of ideas that require you to learn new things to pull them off?