[ Single Most Important Lesson ]

A writing prompt in a class I’m taking asked us to write about “the single most important lesson you’ve learned (in your industry)”. I was surprisingly stumped finding an answer, nothing came to mind. And anyway, what defines a ‘lesson’?

Then I got a bit meta and countered that it depends on the granularity of the question. Does ‘industry’ mean “engineering”, or “pipelines”, or, more specifically, “pipeline safety”?

If I was going to write about lessons, these might be them:
· communicate well,
· understand where your contribution fits into the pipeline system, and,
· effective controls are more important than risk assessments.