Get it right straight out of the chute, or problems are likely to surface immediately and then ramify exponentially if you screw something up at the outset. Do your best not to be caught off guard when facing a new situation, because even a slight lapse of judgment can–and likely will–come back to haunt you tenfold. This is not to say the middlegame and the endgame are not equally important in the grand scheme of things, but mathematics teaches us that incorrect variables introduced early in an equation reverberate disproportionately throughout the remaining equation, whereas incorrect variables introduced at a later juncture do not impact the final product to such an exaggerated degree.
Fred's Soapbox 