# The 26 Principles, Revisited — #1: Temporal Literacy — What I Said, and What’s Actually Happening
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## Article Content
Part of my “26 Principles, Revisited” series — checking my own math, nine months into the year I predicted. Stop judging the speed of your future by the slow pace of your past. That was Day 1 of the original series. The core idea: your instincts about “reasonable” pace were trained on a linear world, and that world is gone. Waiting for 90% certainty, measuring yourself against last decade’s standards, assuming AI would slow down long enough for you to catch up — I called these the Linear Trap. The fix was Temporal Literacy: resetting your internal clock so you stop being surprised by speed. I wrote that piece using Google Gemini’s newest image model as my one-week-old example of “look how fast this is moving.” Since then? In roughly a five-week stretch this August and September alone, five separate frontier AI labs shipped new flagship models — Grok 4.6, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, and DeepSeek V4.1-Flash all landed within about five weeks of each other. Not updates. Full new generations, stacked on top of each other faster than most people can finish evaluating the last one.That’s not a coincidence. That’s the temporal lag I described, playing out in real time, in public, on a five-week clock. And it’s not just AI headlines — analysts now put the half-life of a technical skill at two to five years, down from eight to twelve historically, and the World Economic Forum puts the share of the workforce needing new skills soon at roughly 80%. That’s not a distant 2030 problem. That’s now. Verdict: Nailed it — if anything, I undersold it. Next up: Principle #2, Strategic Self-Pruning — revisited.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/09/the-26-principles-revisited-1-temporal-literacy-what-i-said-and-whats-actually-happening/