It's not knowing what you don't know. Sure, you can stumble into things, reinventing the wheel from time to time, but life gets a lot easier when you know what wheels are going in. I'm put in mind of Konrad Zuse finding out that Boolean algebra was a thing while he was wrestling with the mechanisms needed to make his first machines - just knowing that there was an established formalism and a calculus for binary made a huge difference in how and how quickly his work progressed. If he'd also learned about recurrence relationships, Z2 nd Z3 would probably have been Turing-complete by design rather than merely in potential restrospectively.