This is a guest post by Nader Mowlaee.
Engineers are expected to perform at their best, if not all the time, most of it at least. Room for error in this type of career is small of course, as it can have huge negative impact on an individual project or the lives of millions of people.
It is essential to learn from our mistakes as it can help us become better engineers in our chosen paths, and the first step towards that is understanding how to become self-aware.
Everyone makes mistakes in things they do, such as daily actions and activities, their opinions towards someone or something, or judgements towards techniques and processes that result in poor outcomes, poor reasoning, and overall carelessness.
No matter how good of an engineer you are in your field, there is always going to be a time where you will make a mistake, as the famous saying goes, “Nobody is perfect.” Even machines make mistakes over time.
Why is it important to discuss these common mistakes? Well, prevention is the best solution to avoid mistakes, and we must talk about and accept the fact that we all can be in one of these following five situations at some time during our career.
There are mistakes that you have probably committed but didn’t realize because they happened on a subconscious level and required you to push outside of your comfort-zone, but you failed to do so and hoped and prayed that nothing bad would happen, but it did. Here’s how to avoid disasters from happening again.
When she was about one year old, my daughter, Charlotte, started mimicking what my wife and I did in a big way. If we did it, she wanted to do it. If I stirred my coffee, she wanted to stir her milk. If my wife went to play the piano, Charlotte wanted to play the piano. If I changed the channel on the TV, Charlotte wanted to try to do it, too. It was adorable, and I almost always got a chuckle out of it. Monkey see, monkey do.
