My recommendation is to learn one, decide what you want to do and take it from there.
For me, I started with MAX because I was interested in making game levels for Rainbow Six & Ghost Recon, Red Storm Entertainment released the plug-ins for 3D Max and I started making levels & learned.
After I felt comfortable with 3D Max, I started using Maya PLE, somewhat different but its the same tools. Now I am comfortable in both.
I went with 3D Max because I was interested in games and at that time, 3D Max was being used by most companies in the game industry, now it is different.