Too Many Precautions

The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.

Alfred Adler

I have to admit, the following tidbit had me searching for a while until I gave up because I think warning labels on products would have been around much longer. According to this Wikipedia entry on the “History of warning labels in the US” , the first warning labels “began in 1938 when the United States Congress passed a law mandating that food products have a list of ingredients on the label.” And then, in 1966, “the Federal government mandated that cigarette packs have a warning on them from the surgeon general.”

About the author

Alfred Adler (7 February 1870 – 28 May 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of belonging, family constellation and birth order set him apart from Freud and others in their common circle. He proposed that contributing to others (social interest or Gemeinschaftsgefühl) was how the individual feels a sense of worth and belonging in the family and society. His earlier work focused on inferiority, coining the term inferiority complex, an isolating element which he argued plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, and therefore he called his school of psychology “Individual Psychology” (Orgler 1976).