Stop doing that. I explicitly say in my gist:

"Most of all, don't sweat the stuff you don't understand immediately. Just keep moving."

IO is not important. It behaves no differently at a basic level than any other monad. Monads themselves are just an interface.

Don't put the knowledge on a pedestal, just keep hacking Haskell. It'll all come with time.

This blog post of mine might lend some intuition for monads (including IO): http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2014-03-24-monads-bind-join-actio...

But don't get stuck. It doesn't matter. Just write Haskell code. The compiler won't let you do anything too crazy anyway.