I think a lot of explanations miss the mark on what exactly a monad is, and make it out to be like some kind of tool or data structure or something, when it's really just describing operations on some piece of data.

It can be helpful to just take the word "monad" out of your brain and work up from understanding the idea of a functor first, then gradually understand what a monad is.

In the end, I think, monads are not that exciting outside the world of pure FP :) https://twitter.com/plt_borat/status/228009057670291456