All skills are born out of incompetence, we’ve all heard adages about how the professional has made more mistakes than the amateur. But there’s a caveat.
Someone who is very skilled likely doesn’t repeat mistakes, because the tension between the mistakes they’ve made and the standard they set for themselves is so painful they don’t allow those mistakes to occur again; once is more than enough. And because they don’t repeat mistakes they can choose to move on to areas that require more skill, and end up committing higher-order mistakes that will bring them a few inches closer to the far right of their discipline’s bell curve.
There are certain areas where making the same mistake twice isn’t a mistake; it’s just a lack of commitment.