My mind is blown

Recently I've read two blog posts which have really started to change how I think about programming.  A while ago I found a solution to the word numbers problem which completely stunned me with its simplicity and generality. Today I stumbled upon Apfelmus's "monoids and finger trees" blog post, which is very timely since I can use the same approach to both simplify and generalize a data structure I've been working on recently.

With this in mind, I would like to move from my current awareness (being able to follow along with these discussions) to being able to recognize and apply very general structures.  Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I'd like to know how to make good use of Edward Kmett's packages.  Advice would be appreciated.