Arguably one of the most important elements of learning is making mistakes. This could be while playing the piano, building a table from scratch, doing a sport or even in an exam. What is important is that you learn from it and act with that newfound knowledge going forward. If you were to make a mistake but refused to try something different going forward, then continuing on with that specific objective would be very difficult as you would be hitting an obstacle each time you tried something.
Let us take flooding as an example. Over the past couple of years flood management has gotten significantly better in many flood-prone areas. Albeit it is not always possible to completely avoid it, there are ways to decrease the chances of a flood and many ways to minimise the damages caused by one. By learning from our past mistakes, and by experimenting and discovering we have learned many things about floods and why they happen. Thus, we have been able to invent mitigation techniques and have been able to take precautionary measures before they occur as well.
However, it is also true that it is not always possible to learn from your mistakes the first time. Sometimes, you need to fail at something a couple of times to experience it and truly understand. For example, we learn about titration experiments in chemistry, and although they seem simple enough, getting that precise point where the solution turns fully colorful is often very challenging when doing it for the first time. During these times, it is possible that all you need is more practice and actually applying the things you’ve learned in theory first-hand to really ingrain the information. Other times, it’s not so easy to see where you went wrong and backtracking on what you’ve done is essential to see what went wrong. Only then is it possible to reflect on the issue and find a solution for next time. Going on the titration experiment example, when the time comes to write the lab report, at the end section there is often a reflection part where you think back to the experiment to see what went well and importantly, what you could do better next time to yield better results.
All in all, one of the most consequential parts of learning something is by making mistakes, recognising those mistakes and consequently improving upon them so as to better yourself in that subject or area.