Safety distance

There is a lot you can learn by trial and error. But there are some actions and either whole jobs where errors can have fatal impacts:

• Changing a baby (you have to pay attention that it does not fall from the changing table)
• Driving a car
  
• Doctor at operation
• ... and many, many more

As I work in software development there are a very lot of errors and there are either some sort of errors that can have fatal impacts - for example the programs for money transfer and other data transactions.

In such cases it is important to have a "safety distance" from the dangerous and critical point. I mean here with safety distance every behavior and security tool that helps reducing the probability of fatal incidents. Imagine you are standing on a high rock and look down. You will probably not step to the very front line. So I think of staying away from the most dangerous situations.

When working on large projects it can also be important to avoid situations and solutions that can go easily wrong as for instance think of worst case scenarios and try to avoid them already in advance by choosing different solutions or at least identify early indicators. And for programming it means to do more error checking in your code, use checksums on data transfers and so on.

You are not immediately a perfectionist if you simply keep the "safety distance" to reduce the probability of fatal impacts. Perfectionism starts when keeping the safety distance to non-critical situations.