We've all been there. We've made a mistake in our career that has had serious repurcusions. We might have hit the wrong key, flicked the wrong switch, cut the wrong cable, sent the wrong document or even just looked the wrong way. Despite all the damage control there's still going to be a degree of fallout from the mistake and it's a mistake can be far reaching for lots of people to see.

I remember two such mistakes in my career. The first was when I was doing work experience at a local brewery and distillery for a large drinks manufacturer. On this particular day I was working in the IT department helping to organise some cables. I mistakenly pulled the wrong plug from the wall that was providing the power for over 10 workstations. As a result a lot of people were unhappy that morning. I put my hand to the mistake. There was no getting anyone work back who hadn't saved it.

The second involved deleting data from a production database. While I was working on an application with my own local copy of the database, I was asked to connect to the production database to run a report. Forgetting that I hasn't disconnected from the production database I ran a delete command on a table thinking it was my own development environment. It wasn't. Before I released the key to execute the command, I realised my mistake. I called my team manager over right away and they arranged a back up of the production database to be made while I was still holding the key down. Once I let the keyboard go the data was deleted but promptly brough back using the backup we had taken minutes before.

These are two examples of the biggest mistakes that I have made during my career, thankfully on the scale of things it doesn't get much bigger than that. Some mistakes though end up becoming local or even national news. I've been on the end of a few wrong electricity cables being cut by builders and such but thankfully nothing more serious than that.

Having recently seen a similar mistake being made, it's easy for me to see now how people can let these mistakes worry them. However, it's not the scale of the mistake in terms of visibility that should be the main concern. It's the risk from the mistake. Will this mistake endanger anyone? Am I putting anyone's life at risk? Unless you're working in an already high risk environment then chances are your mistake won't put anyone at risk. When you make a mistake you should remember this.

We all make minor mistakes on a frequent basis. We chide ourselves for them and then move on. It's when the mistakes become grander in scale that we start to worry about their repurcusions. Over my career I've slowly learned that I'll never make a mistake that puts anyone's life at risk. At most, I'll have lost some data which is why I now have back up strategies for my own data and all the applications that I work on.

In each of these cases I unecessarily worried for a few days about the making the mistake and the effort required to get back to normal by people affected by the mistake, but after a few days the worry was gone. Worry is a wasted energy when mistakes happen. Mistakes do happen and for the majority of us, the best thing to do is to take ownership and rectify the mistake as best you can.