Courses and books are pathways that converge on the same truths. Missing a lecture or skipping a chapter does not mean a piece of knowledge is lost to you forever. It means you will arrive at the same truth through another path, eventually — the destination outlasts any single route to it.
The bias is the nagging guilt that any gap in the curriculum is an irreversible loss. It makes you re-read chapters you half-remember, restart courses from the beginning, and treat the table of contents as a checklist rather than a map. But ideas are bigger than their representations. Two different textbooks, two different teachers, two different life experiences can all lead to the same understanding; the insight you missed in chapter four may simply be waiting for you in a conversation, a project, or a book you haven’t opened yet.
So the useful move is not to chase completeness. It is to think hard about what truths hide behind the particular representation in front of you — and to trust that what matters will find another way in. (A reframing I owe to a friend’s notes.)