Posting this was a mistake.

In any endeavor—and in life in general—there are three kinds of mistakes.
The huge mistake is the most obvious one. Once you realize you've made one, there is no going back. You have to take the fall and hope you can rise again another day, if there is another day.
The medium-sized mistakes are easier to notice. And while you usually feel stupid about making these, you can usually fix them as soon as you find them, meaning you wasted a bit of time or effort, but it didn't matter much in the long run. These are the mistakes you usually "learn from."
The final kind are the teeny-tiny itsy-bitsy mistakes. You can't notice an individual mistake of this kind, except when it is committed by someone else. And since you don't notice them individually, they can accumulate. And accumulate they often do, creating a slow and gradual downward trajectory of microscopic failures which do not seem to have any identifiable origin.

Probably not to scale.

The third kind of mistake are often the ones that doom projects, people and even entire civilizations. However, people like to blame the huge mistakes, even when there are none, even if it means calling a medium-sized mistake a huge one.