You can just follow handbook and get a workable system within a few hours. The real question is: what do you want it for? If it's just for the kicks, you probab

You can just follow handbook and get a workable system within a few hours. The real question is: what do you want it for? If it's just for the kicks, you probably want to spend some more time exploring what you can break. You'll probably find out that, other than outright breakage, nothing you do has as much impact as you expected to. I'd say that there are only two valid non-educational reasons to use Gentoo: getting a stripped down (for security or embedded) system or to alpha-test a lot of the free software ecosystem at the same time (e.g. build all your system out of repositories HEADs, a friend was doing that for a long time).