Means to an end, or why mistakes will be made!
It is all written, yet, we still need to learn to read, right?
For it ("it" being all of that which we do) is not about finding success through sheer luck!
See, randomness occurs. It's everywhere. One might be working on this or that and, by a struck of luck, the numbers align and there it is, the winning ticket. And that's good and all, I'm not about to criticize how some will find an answer just because they were in the shower. No! We all have had our "Eureka!" moments (and science backs this up) in the shower.
What I don't quite understand though is how some (i.e.: NOT YOU, of course) don't realize just that it was exactly by chance that the answer was found.
I'll speak about me to get to the point. I have a good memory. Early in life I discovered this trait which, to be honest, is actually quite helpful. I'm not "more intelligent" than you or others, things simply "stick" easier on my brain. It has helped me a lot and got me to solve really quite complex and demanding situations. So, lucky me, I can remember "stuff".
My father though, who is a brilliant man, taught me to never simply rely on my memory. Some things (most things) need not to be remembered but, in fact, they need to be understood. "That's how the brain works best", he says, "in making connections throughout everything you learn, you develop new information that will ultimately help you either create something new or adapt something existing".
Experimentation, then, is key to developing new paradigms and, also, to better understand how to step up to a challenge. And it should be implied then that, in some cases, we (yes, YOU and me) will make mistakes.
Imagine that "Eureka!" moment, finishing a task fast because you got a spark and then... Simply leaving it at that ("Done, good riddance") without giving a second thought to how to reproduce it, or even better, how to improve on it. By not stopping to learn and understand from our solution, we would be denying ourselves the chance of improving (ourselves and our solutions).
We're perfectible (I prefer this word instead of "flawed") and we should strive to be better at what we do every day, hence the need to stop after finding "the next step", inspect our surroundings and then plan for the one after it. Hence the need for feedback!
So if I was to rely solely on my memory to reach a goal, I'd be cheating myself out of true knowledge. By making an island out of myself, I might be locking myself out of what the rest of my team thinks and ideas that could be improved upon, are not improved at all!
A mistake is just that, something that happens to all of us in whatever that is that we do. Understandably, some mistakes are easily avoided (by learning from past experience amongst peers, for example) some are inevitable.
Same applies to "copy/paste" solutions, we've all had to use them (some more than others) but not all of us take time to understand how it works and what they do... But I'll leave this for another post :)
Yes, we are supposed to make mistakes, and we will keep making them unless we take some time to learn from them, or better yet, if we cannot explain how we reached said solution, then we would have not understood it and thus, we would be at a loss.
Bottom line: be humble, make mistakes, learn!