Daily Inspiration Quote by Franklin P. Jones

Experience is supposed to be our upgrade: the software patch that stops us from repeating the same dumb move. Franklin P. Jones, a journalist with a newspaperman's allergy to self-seriousness, punctures that fantasy in a single dry turn. The joke lands because it reverses the motivational-poster promise. Experience doesn't prevent error; it sharpens your timing. You still step on the rake, you just recognize the rake mid-swing.

The intent is pragmatic cynicism, the kind you pick up on deadline. Journalism teaches a particular truth about human nature: patterns repeat, incentives don’t change, and people are forever rediscovering the same problems with fresh confidence. Jones smuggles that worldview into a line that reads like advice but behaves like a diagnosis. It's not anti-learning; it's anti-myth. The subtext is that "wisdom" often amounts to a slightly more informed version of your old self, not a transformed one.

What makes the line work is its quiet admission of complicity. There's no safe distance here. The "again" is the punch: it implies that error is sticky, even seductive, and that recognition is a modest achievement, not a victory lap. In an era of postwar managerial optimism and self-help uplift (Jones wrote in the mid-20th century, when progress was a civic religion), this is a small act of rebellion. It's a reminder that growth is rarely linear; it's iterative, embarrassing, and sometimes indistinguishable from relapse, except for the moment your brain whispers, "Ah. This one."