Sure:
I was initially attracted to mining based on stories of GPU mining of BTC. I knew I had missed the boat on BTC mining, but I thought that I might be able to get ahead of curve with scrypt, but I was mistaken, clearly.
I also thought it might be a good way to diversify on my investment, things with BTC were pretty shaky around Mt. Gox time, and I thought that I could always sell the scrypt miners, or, if I got hacked, my investment sat in the miners and not in a wallet.
It was a decent diversification strategy in theory, but it underestimated difficulty increases and also the amount of time I had to invest in getting miners running.