You can try your luck at at the “school of hard knocks” but that is usually riddled with unforeseeable costs. When you begin any unfamiliar task, you do not know what you do not know. The fool begins, but hopefully the fool is wise enough to enlist the wisdom of those who’ve walked the path before him. We either learn by example or we learn from experience. If we learn by example, we glean from the fruits of someone else’s mistakes, without having to suffer those errors ourselves. Yes, there’s something to be said to the “immersive” approach of diving into the deep end of the pool, but most of us need to learn to swim first.
All learning is experience — the only question is whether I have to suffer the experience myself or whether I’ll heed the warnings of others. Again, if something is new, I can’t know what the pitfalls are! I can only hear someone up ahead warning me not to stray too far from a particular path. I can’t see the potential dangers, so I can either 1) ignore the advice of others and find out for myself, or 2) I can heed the advice of others and spare myself experiencing the dangers directly. Those of us who are bullheaded will opt to ignore advice and throw ourselves into life. This path hurts. The milder path is to enlist the assistance of those who have already amassed experiences.