growing pains

When someone tells you something you understand it on a cognitive level, but you never really understand it on a visceral level. Until you experience it. I find that often good advice is never really as useful as a good fuck-up. For example, our professor has been telling us the same pieces of advice for about a year now. And for some reason, we refuse to really listen to him. Not out of defiance, but out of a lack of true understanding. We would do the things he told us to, but only because he told us to. It was not until we struggled through the lesson that we understood it. And you have to go though it. There's no other way to truly understand it. For the most part, if it's painful, you're learning. The pain is the process. Not the most enjoyable thing in the world, but the best way to learn.