When the student is ready, the teacher appears

We’ve all heard this before. And in our own ways, we’ve all interpreted it.

But what if there’s another way to look at it?

As usual, let me start with a personal story.

When I decided to turn my passion for baking into a profession, I found myself having to choose between two verticals – B2B and B2C. Personally, I preferred B2C. Coz let’s be honest, there’s something deeply validating about people loving something you’ve created. And receiving direct feedback for the same? A satisfaction unmatched.

But as business grew, so did my exhaustion.

I didn’t know how to say no. I kept accepting customisations. I worked long hours.

And slowly, the passion that once felt effortless started feeling heavy.

Burnout didn’t arrive dramatically. It crept in quietly.

And then came a very familiar thought:

Quit.

So I did what most of us do. I changed the environment.

I moved into B2B – supplying to restaurants. It felt smarter. More efficient. Orders were standardized. Everything was predictable. It looked like organized progress.

I even hired an assistant and taught her everything there was to know about making those specific products from scratch. When she learnt everything and became a pro, I left the kitchen in her hands and resumed with my love for traveling. I think it’s fair to say it was the happiest I’d ever been in the profession.

For a while, it worked.

Until it didn’t.

As the restaurants changed their teams and expectations shifted, the same patterns returned – just in a different form.

Requests increased. Boundaries blurred. Innumerable trials that costed more than daily production; with no approvals in sight.

And once again, the same thought resurfaced:

Quit.

That’s when something clicked.

It wasn’t the people. It wasn’t even the workload.

It was the pattern.

Different environments. Same experience. Same ending.

And that led to an uncomfortable question:

What if instead of leaving …I had stayed?

Stayed long enough to understand what actually went wrong.

Maybe I didn’t need a new vertical. Maybe I needed better systems. Better checks. Clearer customisations.

Maybe the problem wasn’t the vertical.

Maybe it was that I was still operating like a passion house, when I needed to become a business house.

But those realizations don’t come when you leave.

They come when you stay.

Doesn’t mean you have to stay with the situation. But it does mean that you’ve gotta stay with the thought. The thought of what exactly went wrong in both the situations.

That’s when I came back to the quote-

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears”.

But this time I saw it differently. What if-

“The teachers are constantly appearing.

The student decides when to enter the classroom…and when to stay.”

But most of the times, we never really enter the classroom. We hover around them.

We complain. We feel wronged. We look for a better one. But we never truly enter.

And we definitely don’t stay long enough.

What if growth isn’t about finding better classrooms but about deciding to sit through one long enough to graduate?

And from what I have realized, whenever there is a pattern repeating in our lives, there is always an open classroom that we haven’t graduated from.

Apply this to your relationships too, maybe? ;)