If you follow the elephant, you never get entangled in the forest.

An elephant does not pick its way through a forest. It walks, and the forest gives way. Branches break, grass goes flat, and behind it there is a clear trail.

Whoever follows that trail does none of that work. They are not stronger or cleverer than someone cutting through the bush alongside them. They simply chose to walk where something bigger had already been.

That is the lesson. Find the person who has already done the thing you are trying to do, and go the way they went. The mistakes they made have already cleared the branches you would have walked into.

Another proverb in this archive, from Ghana, puts the mechanism even plainer: go through the high grass after the elephant has passed, and you will not get soaked with the dew.