How can someone grow without making mistakes?
The truth of the matter is that one can simply grow by taking advantage of learning from other peoples past mistakes, because you literally don't have to make one or have personal experience about losing funds on CEX or altcoins before knowing that saving huge funds in Centralized exchanges are big risk, just as O.P clearly stated as those are his/her two lessons learned this year as it concerns the forum/crypto world at large.
Sometimes, some lessons are learned best from one mistake and not the mistake of another person.
Quite a few people actually learn from other's mistakes, the rest will rather make the same mistake and learn from their own experiences.
Mistakes are part of life, but in all, we should always calculate and try to manage the risk level of whatever we want to go into.
Only involved with what you can afford to handle against putting all your life savings into an investment in what you can't control.