Having never worked with MCU's before but always wanted to, I got myself a PIC18 in march 2011 and invited work colleagues to a talk on MCU programming the week after. This way I forced myself into learning about MCUs in general and PIC assembler in particular.
The first talk went really well and a few weeks later I held another talk, this time focusing on the Netduino and NETMF development. The advantages of this platform turned out to be immense and I've been totally hooked since - just ask my wife .