That saying doesn't have anything to do with ethics or doing things right... instead it's about always having the expectation that things won't go right. The belief that bad things are going to happen all the time.
Seems like it would be better to believe and expect that things are going to go right and seek ways to do things right to reinforce the expectation of having a good outcome and IF things don't go right, we're going to do all we can to make them right if it's in our power to do so.
I think the "do things so they can't fail"/"expect things to fail and so do things that will prevent those things happening" is a complicated interaction, not a one-or-the-other. NASA astronauts do an exercise where they sit around a table and brainstorm all the ways they might die, and then come up with lists of things that should happen in those cases, then figure out all the ways the items on those lists might fail and they end up dying anyway, etc. But I think those life-threatening accidents don't actually end up befalling them too much in reality, because they plan and train so well to prevent them.
This is a solid position to take, and if you are trying to feed your family as a tradesman it will help you all sleep better at night.However, there are common practices, learned and engrained, which last for decades and when a tradesman delineates from those, they are little more than self marketing.
While imagination and evolution, are boundless, delineating from secure practices can subject others to losses that could well have been avoided.This is a solid position to take, and if you are trying to feed your family as a tradesman it will help you all sleep better at night.
But if everyone took this path there would be no innovation or adaptability, as well as few options for customers. Common practices are themselves the product of earlier tradesmen (perhaps optimistic "glass half-full" people) taking risks and learning from the consequences. How else did we wind up with all these different ways to do framing, roofs, plumbing, etc.
NO it isn't, It's conducting ones practice in a manner that prevents the eventuality of ones ethics or integrity being questioned.
Murphy's law
Murphy's law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." In some formulations, it is extended to "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time."
Ethics and integrity are not a coin flip, and I'm never in a quandary about the longevity on my workmanship.
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