That's too funny, because I got into it when I was off work on disability leave. I was bored, living on a 70%-of-salary disability benefit, and used my meager mutual fund savings as seed money to start more active investing. The goals was to generate some wealth in the stock market to make up for not being able to save anything on my disability income.
As it turned out, I eventually returned to work three years later at full salary, but my average annual stock market gains are now 3 or 4 times higher than my annual employment income. I started out investing for sport and to augment my disability income at the time, and now I work for sport and to augment my investment income.