About this quote

One careless test can wipe out careful work in a single moment. Curiosity drives progress, but it also pushes people toward obvious hazards just to see what happens. Notice the impulse before you act: name the likely consequence and who will be hurt if it goes wrong. If you still feel the pull, set a safe experiment or ask someone else to take the risk.

When to use it

• Server-room emergency reset: I wanted to flip the big red switch to try and fix the outage myself, but I called the on-call engineer instead.
• Chemistry lab with an unlabelled bottle: half the class reached for it and I stopped them and paged the instructor.
• At home with the toddler and the fireplace guard: I could see the kid reaching for the warning tag, so I moved the guard out of reach and distracted them.
• During a market dip: I was about to move my emergency fund into a rumor-driven trade just to see what would happen; I closed the trading app and waited 24 hours.