Learn from the mistakes of others—you can't live long enough to make them all yourself.

Experience is a fine teacher, but it is slow and sometimes expensive, and our lives are too short to pay for every lesson ourselves. The quote's joke carries a practical point: the pool of possible mistakes is enormous, so anyone who insists on discovering each one personally will run out of time long before running out of errors. It rests on an old strand of practical wisdom, found in proverbs across many cultures, that the wise person learns from others' failures while the fool learns only from his own. It is also the quiet logic behind apprenticeships, case studies, and the study of history.

The attribution is uncertain. The line circulates under several names, Eleanor Roosevelt's among them, and I know of no solid evidence tying it firmly to Martin Vanbee, so it is safest to treat it as a popular saying.

Today, the idea might look like this: before signing a lease for a small café, you ask two or three former owners why their places closed. You read what went wrong, perhaps cash flow or a bad location, and you plan around those traps. You will still make mistakes, but they will be new ones, which is a more interesting way to learn.