If you're using Monaco, I assume you're on a Mac, so you can get plenty of practice with the default key bindings, as OS X respects the basic emacs/readline bindings everywhere you can type.

Discovering M-x apropos was probably the moment I realised emacs wasn't at all scary, and in fact just wanted to help and make me productive. A big hurdle with any text editor is having the discipline to realise that if you're doing something repetitive and boring, you're probably doing it wrong. All the built in documentation and help functions in emacs give you a big head start finding the right way to do what you're doing, and you'll just randomly pick up useful stuff along the way.

Beyond that, it's just finding what modes are useful for you. Magit is incredible, org-mode's great if you do that sort of thing, and any language with a REPL thrives under emacs.

Most people I know just learn enough elisp to keep their .emacs up to date, so don't be too intimidated by that, but more power to you if you eventually master it.