Decision-Making Quote by Archer J. P. Martin

Perfectionism rarely shows up wearing a cape; it shows up as a checklist so long it talks you out of starting. Archer J. P. Martin's line is a neat little indictment of a mindset that confuses safety with seriousness. The surface meaning is practical - if you try to anticipate every risk upfront, you drain the momentum you need to do the work. The deeper cut is psychological: "precaution" becomes a socially acceptable mask for fear, procrastination, or the need to look impeccably rational.

The phrasing matters. "Every conceivable precaution" is deliberately maximalist, almost comic in its scope. Conceivable by whom? The imagination, especially an anxious one, is an infinite factory for worst-case scenarios. Martin isn't arguing against care; he's targeting the fantasy of total control. That fantasy is demoralizing because it turns any project into an unwinnable pretrial, where you must prove innocence against hypothetical failures before you're allowed to act.

Context helps even if his profession is listed as unknown. Martin is best known as a Nobel-winning chemist associated with chromatography, a field where progress comes from iterative experimentation, not immaculate planning. In labs and in life, you learn by doing: you run a test, you see what breaks, you refine. The quote reads like a defense of productive risk - not recklessness, but the willingness to move forward with imperfect information.

The subtext is almost managerial: stop trying to de-risk the future into submission. Begin, accept some exposure, and let evidence, not dread, set the next precaution.