Cost of Mistakes

21 Jun 2022

Fantastic advice by Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki and much, much more:

I can’t tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don’t matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it. […] When you get in situations where you cannot afford to make a mistake, it’s very hard to do the right thing. So if you’re trying to do the right thing, the right thing might be to eliminate the cost of making a mistake rather than try to guess what’s right.

Said in the context of software development, I think it applies to many aspects of life.