For American whiskey, just drink lots of cheap whiskey and figure out what you like and don't like. Buy some Heaven Hill and some Knob Creek --- which is aged Jim Beam --- and see if you have a preference between the two; if you like the Knob Creek more, you like a little rye, and if you like the Heaven Hill, explored wheated bourbon.
For Scotch, try Springbank (Campbelltown), Aberlour A'bunadh (Speyside), and Bowmore (Islay). See which you like best.
If you're at a point where you have a particular kind of bourbon you like (high-rye or wheated or whatever) and a particular kind of Scotch you like (low peat or lots of sherry or whatever), then, I've got bad news for you: relative to the population, you are officially "into whiskey". :)
Start cheap and stay cheap as long as you can. Get to a point where if you're spending more than $30 for American whiskey or $60 for Scotch, you know exactly where the money is going and why you're spending it. I think that's the antidote to becoming a vanity whiskey weirdo.
Dyed-in-the-acrylic sock-hater.
My few contacts looked like this:
* About 15 years ago I visited a friend who was studying in Edinburgh. She didn't know too much about it, but got into drinking it now and then, and she showed me two or three types. I liked them, although the only thing I can differentiate is peat or no peat, more or less. And she told me that it's okay to put water in it. Blew my mind!
* Around the same time, three of my friends got into whiskey. A lot. I sometimes tasted a bit when I was at their home. Two of them (a couple) fell into that hole and are now proud owners of many, many bottles, club memberships of Scottish distilleries, special glasses, holiday trips to a dozen distilleries, magazine subscriptions, everything.
* Whenever I hear whiskey fans talk about the drink, I hear wine talk. "It's a bit like freshly mowed grass from the south side of the hill, and a lot of bananas afterwards" or stuff like that. It turns me off, but it seems to be obligatory to talk like that.
* Two years ago I was at a pretty renowned whiskey bar/store: lots of different whiskeys, very expensive ones behind a fence, the owner also travelling to whiskey fairs. I asked the waitress to recommend one, for a total beginner. She had no clue about what the bar had to offer and said "maybe try the offer of the day?". Probably a temporary worker, but still...
* A year ago I met my friends again when I came back home. There was a small whisky fair (think: fifteen stores/importers from around Germany, and I think Austria as well). That was the worst anti-PR you could imagine. First of all, again nobody could recommend something for a beginner and maybe explain why they recommended this or that. They just shoved something towards me. When I even dared to ask, because this whole affair was so embarassingly snobbish. I was cringing hard when my friend was "debating" the finer points of Gaelic pronunciation with an importer. Or when another importer didn't want to tell where the (brandlabelled?) whisky was from, instead doing a little quiz ("There is a creek where distillery X is located, and if you follow it upstream, there are Y other distilleries. It's the one with no letter "C" and a yearly output of less than Z litres" or something like that). This was simply a bunch of nerds showing how much smarter they were than their counterpart.
* So far I'm very rarely buying something, and if I do, it's from the supermarket, and for mixed drinks. Jim Beam, usually. Hate me!