To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.

Experience lights up where you have already been, not where you are going. That makes it far less useful as a guide than it feels, because the confidence it produces is about a route that is now behind you, on water that has changed. People with long careers get caught by this constantly: the pattern they learned was real, and it stopped being the pattern.

Keep the lesson, and check the conditions it was learned in. When you catch yourself saying that something never works, name the year you found that out and what has changed since. Some of it will still hold. Some of it is lighting up an empty wake.