How do you prevent validation errors from being triggered in the first place?

You can prevent validation errors by ensuring that the data being passed to your Mongoose operations is valid. This involves: 1) Carefully validating the data received from external sources (e.g., forms, APIs) before storing it. 2) Implementing input sanitization to remove potentially malicious or invalid characters. 3) Using schema validation to enforce data integrity at the database level. By proactively validating data, you can minimize the chances of encountering validation errors.