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Experimentation and practice both consist of repeating the same behavior.

If you beat your head against the wall enough times sometimes the wall gives way.

It's not useful to expect to be successful on the first try.

But the circumstances having changed (the wall gets progressively weaker with each attempt) can be taken to mean that you aren't quite "doing the same thing" and so this terrible quote sadly lives on in the minds of the pedantic.

By that definition, in the real world you never do the same thing twice. Your environment always changes (in fact there are several natural laws dictating that it does).

From the pedantic viewpoint the quote may be true, but then it doesn't say anything useful anymore.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”

― Heraclitus

(I thought this quote was Xeno, but the internet says I'm wrong)

We're in agreement on that, and that's why this quote is terrible and amounts to nothing.

fair point -- we are subtly varying our practice attempts and the world is subtly changing, and sometimes those trends intersect in such a way that the clouds part.

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