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 utmost 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 ten- or even twenty-fold. This isn’t 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 don’t impact the final product to such an exaggerated degree. In other words, all errors are NOT created equal; early mistakes are more insidious and infect the patient to a far greater extent than opportunistic pathogens that gleefully pile on in the latter stages of a pandemic. For the sake of convenience, just remember this counterintuitive little aphorism: First is worst!
Fred's Soapbox 