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Reader question: Please explain this sentence: “Trust me on this; I have learned it the hard way.” The hard way? My comments: Here, the speaker gives you a piece of advice and wants you to trust them on it because they’re speaking from experience. And perhaps some painful experience. Learning something the hard way is a nice little phrase to learn, and I’ll try to make it easy learning for you here. We all learn things from books at school, for instance. That’s learning our lessons, literally, and that’s the easy way. However, not everything teachers tell you is true or is good for you later on in life. You ask: How can anything teachers tell us at school be wrong? That’s a good question. I’m sure all teachers mean well and have a clear conscience and everything and I am not going to hear anyone arguing otherwise, either. However, textbook examples are not always applicable in the real world. In fact, Woody Allen actually joked in one of his films that everything his teachers say is good is bad. Or something to that effect. He must have learned some of his lessons the hard way, to be sure. Anyways, let’s take a simpler example of learning a lesson the hard way. Perhaps this even happened to you. Ma and pa, for example, tell us kids not to put our fingers on top of the candle flame or we’ll get burned. Some of us will take the heed but some of us will not listen. We will do exactly that, put our fingers to the flame and get burned. | 
