Over-confidence is the safety risk

Few years ago, I was working in a Chennai, 500 KM away from Coimbatore, where my family resides. The usual trip between the cities is on long weekends, so does the large crowd settled in Singara Chennai. With a huge crowd looking to travel back on long weekends, reserving a seat was not easiest thing to do. I booked my ticket a week back and in relaxed manner went to boarding point. While checking the ticket I noticed the booking was for previous day. There was no way to travel back on that day.

My kid in her early years used to play with whatever she get to hold - steering wheel, headset, Mouse, Notepad anything and everything. She curiously explore it for sometime and try to crush/bang it and loved the noise it made. We won’t allow her to wander alone into balcony and restroom, rest of the rooms are allowed.She was playing with the latest grocery purchase and we were doing our chores - what could go wrong? Kid took hold of spice packet, banged it on near by utensil, a packet of chilli powder broke and it spilled into her eyes. Since, then for years she was afraid of spices. Even now she is hesitant to consume even mild spicy food.

You work on something the whole day. The Windows restarts while you were away for a break, only to realise the file wasn’t saved. This was very common mishap, Control & S were the ones getting punished for this. There were countless instances of staying back in office only to restore days of work over a night just-in-time to save next day’s presentation or audit. Not all heroes wear cape, some wear previous day’s clothes for the presentation. All this was avoided thanks to the arrival of OneDrive and autosave feature.

The common factor across all three scenarios are over-confidence. Assuming we have things under control, when in reality we are not. By far over-confidence is a biggest safety concern, impacting toddler to adults, affecting situations as menial as writing something to deadly maneuvers.

I found checklists as good way to overcome this. Checklists reduces the mental load to keep track of things and thereby allowing us to focus on what we are doing rather than processing multiple tasks at once.

Being pessimist or expecting things to go wrong could be a way to stay vigilant. If you’re expecting something to go wrong, you will be extra careful and ready to handle the surprise (or shock). At the end, if there are nothing went wrong, thats an added bonus.