True, but that’s the long (all you need is seat time) approach. 
The best way to stay at the limit is to learn to recognize the limit as it approaches, instead of identifying it as you breach it.
Of course, you can’t learn to drive at the limit without going over it occasionally, but what you extract from that experience is critical to your development. If you just brush it off, regroup, and then go head-long again into the breach, you’re learning a very small fraction of what you could. That is, you’re basically teaching yourself to drive by rote; REACTING to what is happening or has happened.
However, if you put the effort into extracting all of the information and lessons you can from the experience (mistake), then you can teach yourself to RECOGNIZE the limit as you are approaching it.
Driving by REACTION requires analysis (a bandwidth-limited, stress inducing, serial process). Driving by RECOGNITION (comparing a holistic moment in time to your mental model of the track), is an extremely efficient parallel process. Of course, both are needed in different circumstances (e.g. REACTION is typically needed in rain driving), but the more you can drive by RECOGNITION, the quicker, more consistent, and more relaxed you’ll be.
There is a bunch of info about extracting lessons from your experience on my site here, and when combined with imagery and race walking training it can profoundly increase the value of your seat time, and the breadth and depth of you learning.
There are some very subtle, but very crucial, shifts that occur in attention, awareness, and perception when you begin to transition from reactive driving to recognition driving. These same changes also influence the level (or timing) of your sensitivity, which is critical when you want to drive by recognizing the limit instead of reacting to it.
By way of explanation, I’m going to use the idea of a cornering energy cycle, which I’ve mentioned in other posts. The energy cycle starts with a driving input, and then:
- That causes energy to flow through the chassis
- That energy pours into one or more tires and produces load
- That load produces traction/slip angles
- That traction produces forces that act on the kart
The cycle starts with a small amount of energy and then grows bit-by-bit as the forces actin on the kart cause more energy to enter the cycle. This cycle continues until the tire contains the maximum amount of energy it can handle (and therefore is producing the maximum traction it can); then the cycle reverses and the energy dissipates from the tire back into the chassis.
So the energy cycle speaks to sequence, timing, etc. However, another way to look at the elements of the energy cycle is to consider them as levels of sensitivity. For example:
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If your awareness is primarily focused on (#4) forces acting on your kart, which is the end of the energy cycle, then you are driving based purely on reaction… you are constantly reacting based on what the forces are doing to your kart.
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If your awareness is primarily focused on (#3) and you stay focused on only the traction/slip angles you are feeling in the moment, then you are still driving primarily based on reaction. However, if you expand your focus to take in both the current traction level, and the trends in traction, then you are starting to add an element of recognition to your driving.
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If your awareness is primarily focused on (#2) tire loads, and/or the energy pouring into your tires, then you are well into the recognition realm. From this perspective, there are still two more stages in the energy cycle, which means you may be sufficiently ahead of the curve to recover (or minimize) a ‘mistake’ before it manifests on the track.
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If your awareness is primarily focused on (#1) managing energy transfer (to produce the loads/traction/forces you want), then you are driving from recognition. However, beyond that, you are actively creating your sensations; you have taken control and are performing the driving actions at the precise time/location needed to produce the energy cycle your mental model indicates is needed to get around the corner.
That said, sensitivity is more of a continuum than discrete levels, so I think of:
The range between #4 - #3 as Reactive Sensitivity
The range between #3 - #2 as Predictive Sensitivity
The range between #2 - #1 as Directed Sensitivity