Although a cool comic strip I believe this to be a fallacy. Here‘s an excerpt from a summary of the book „Creativity Inc“, which has a lot more insights like these:
Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited.
“We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said, “lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.”
Basically you will never understand why something happened only that it happened. Changing the probable reasons of an event can have more unwanted side effects. Also the influence of oneself is often more limited than we think.