The only way out is through

Robert Frost famously said, “The only way out is through.” Teaching is exactly that: digging yourself into a hole. Eventually, everything you teach, everything your students learn, becomes a local minima. At some point, if you try hard enough to teach, you inevitably reach failure.

As a parent, tutor, big brother or sister, mentor, teaching assistant, professor, or coach, always expect failure.

Because what you teach is NEVER enough.

You teach A, B, and C. They learn A, B, and C. Then you keep going until A, B, and C are no longer enough. At that moment, you fail.

This failure is crucial.

At this limit, when what you’ve taught no longer works, real learning begins. You encounter something new, something beyond your knowledge. Sometimes the mentee surpasses you, sometimes not. Either way, this is where genuine growth happens.

If you never experience this failure, you aren’t truly learning. And if you aren’t learning, you aren’t teaching either.

Teaching isn’t about avoiding failure. It’s about reaching that failure and pushing through it to something deeper and better.

Teaching means constantly finding yourself at the bottom, then working through it. Because the only real way out is always through.