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As I currently understand it, any commit you push to the main branch (so not wip/feature branches) will count towards your activity graph being filled out. This includes projects in your own repo.

So I'm assuming you were referring to the possible difficulty of finding and selecting projects to contribute to. You can also contribute to ones of your own.

Also the chart backfills, so if you work in a feature branch and it gets merged into a main branch, github looks at the dates of your commits and uses that.

As I mentioned in the comments on my site (not sure if you're the same poster), I work on a lot of personal projects, as well as any open source software I use or want to try out, but have issues with that I can fix. It's interesting to be able to resolve other peoples' issues. Gives you that warm fuzzy feeling.

also what if your pull request doesn't get merged?

You still get your local contribution; merges are counted as contributions by the person who presses merge. It makes sense in terms of what really happens in terms of Git, I guess.