Judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.

The saying expresses a pragmatic, almost cyclical view of learning: sound judgment is rarely innate and is typically forged through lived experience, while experience itself is often accumulated through mistakes. Its sting lies in the admission that error is not an exception but a primary teacher. Read as advice, it encourages humility and resilience—treating misjudgments as tuition paid for wisdom rather than as permanent disqualifications. It also implies that leaders and institutions should expect fallibility and build systems that learn from failure, since the path to better decisions commonly runs through earlier, worse ones.