IWTL I Want To Learn

It's difficult to learn from a mistake without an external reference point. To learn from a mistake, you first have to recognize that you have made a mistake. How will you do this on your own? Presumably if you could recognize the mistake, you would have avoided it in the first place.

Second, even if you know that you made a mistake, it's hard to know for sure what the mistake was. Say for instance that you did some step in a task badly, and you can see that the results were poor, so you tell yourself "I'll do this better next time". But maybe the issue wasn't in your performance, but that you were rushing - you didn't give yourself enough time to prepare and then you didn't take enough time to do the work properly. So, the problem isn't in your execution of the task but in your planning for the task.

It's very difficult to recognize this sort of thing in your own work without some outside perspective (what does good planning look like in this context? how would you know without someone else's guidance?), and you have to be very self-aware and also collect data on your own work so that you can review and analyze it later (which is time-consuming, and you might be re-inventing the wheel, when you could've just asked for guidance from someone with experience).

Frankly, this is why writers benefit from editors. You can't effectively edit your own writing - you'll either be too critical and never actually publish anything, or not critical enough and publish garbage, or both. In any case the problem is that you're too attached, too close to your own work to judge it fairly - you can't see the forest for the trees. You need the perspective of someone outside.

Rather than trying to exist without guidance, you should learn to recognize sources of good guidance and pay attention to them, and keep them in your life when you find them.

In order to know that something is wrong, you have to know what it's like when it's right. In order to know how not to do it wrong, you need to know how to do it right. If you haven't experienced the process of doing it right, then you need guidance.

Also, also, very important, always remember: It's possible to do everything right and still fail.