Follow the tutorial! It's really really good.
Turn on god-mode. It turns off e.g. the arrow keys and the delete key, forcing you to use the movement keys and keybindings for deleting word, character, etc. It'll yell at you in the minibuffer with the command you SHOULD have hit, so you'll know. It builds the muscle memory super quickly.
Keyboard macros are dope. My keys are bound to f3 and f4 but I don't remember if that's standard. Basically you hit f3 to open a macro, do some stuff, and then hit f4 to close it. Then you hit C-x e to execute it from the point, and hit e repeatedly to keep executing it. Super convenient. As an example, you might make a macro where you move the point to the beginning of the line, deletes 2 characters of whitespace, then moves to the next line. But you gotta be careful it's actually gonna do what you want; you'll get better at this over time. You generally have to imagine the point exists at a random point in a line, and find how to get it to where it needs to go, before you're able to do the real work of the macro.
Get Projectile. It's fantastic for navigating projects. It binds its key prefix to C-c p, and binding ANYTHING to C-c whatever is frowned upon heavily, so be aware of that. Doing things like project wide searches (C-c p s s) is super fast, and makes navigating codebases manageable.
I LOVE Helm. It's a huge departure from vanilla emacs, so know that going into it. That said, I love what it does. Basically you have a minibuffer chilling at the bottom of the screen above the normal minibuffer, and it is usually hidden until activated. Then when you activate it (e.g. in the projectile search) it shows the results of the operation in the helm minibuffer. http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html is a good intro to it.
But really, pay attention to what you like and don't like about everything. Then find things that scratch your itches. I really encourage you to start from vanilla emacs, bringing in packages as you find you need them, so you fall onto your own unique, special editor, built just for you. That said, I sort of understand the appeal of starting with a config that's curated for you already. Though if you decide to make your own configs, use-package is fantastic for managing the complexity of it all. Emacs is a wonderful editor, and you're in for a wonderful experience. You just have to be willing to put up with some annoyance before you make it your own. As a datapoint, it took about a month and a half when I started using it to get it behaving the way I wanted. It's still a thing I tinker with occasionally, especially when I venture into a new language, but I leave it alone most of the time.