I think with something like Vim it's best to get a grasp on the very basics (saving/opening documents, moving into and out of insert mode, navigating with hjkl) and then add one of two things at a time as you get comfortable with those. If you try to do everything at once you just end up getting overwhelmed.

I didn't really start to like Vim until I started playing around with my .vimrc file. There were too many minor irritants and things I wanted changed. An Ask HN on the subject came in very handy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=856051

Mine (along with a few other minor customizations) is at http://github.com/samdk/vimconf/blob/master/dotvimrc if you'd like to take a look.

Some other good resources: http://dotfiles.org/.vimrc http://www.vi-improved.org/vimrc.php