Education Quote by Casey Stengel

Stengel’s line lands like a locker-room joke that’s secretly a life plan: failure isn’t an embarrassing detour, it’s the tuition. Coming from a baseball lifer who played, managed, and mythologized the game, “go broke three times” isn’t really about bank accounts. It’s about getting stripped of illusions repeatedly until what’s left is usable knowledge: how to read people, how to pace risk, how to survive your own bad instincts.

The number three is doing heavy lifting. Once could be bad luck, twice could be stubbornness, three times is the pattern finally becoming visible. Stengel implies that competence isn’t a gift you discover; it’s a habit you build by being punished for the wrong version of yourself. That’s a sharp rebuke to the American fantasy that success is a clean narrative with one inspirational setback. He’s saying you don’t learn “making a living” from winning; you learn it from losing so thoroughly you can’t romanticize it anymore.

In the mid-century sports world Stengel came up in, careers were precarious, unions were weak, and glory didn’t guarantee stability. That context makes the quote less hustle-poster, more hard-earned realism. It also smuggles in a kind of compassion: if someone’s on their first or second collapse, they’re not doomed, they’re in training. The sting is also the comfort.