---
title: "The 26 Principles, Revisited — #6: Iterative Obsession — What I Said, and What’s Actually Happening"
canonical: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/09/the-26-principles-revisited-6-iterative-obsession-what-i-said-and-whats-actually-happening/
updated: 2026-09-22T17:06:40+00:00
---

# The 26 Principles, Revisited — #6: Iterative Obsession — What I Said, and What’s Actually Happening

*Part of my “26 Principles, Revisited” series — checking my own math, nine months into the year I predicted.*

*Make more ‘better’ mistakes!*

![](https://jimcarroll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2026-6IterativeObsession.jpg)

Day 6 flipped the old ROI math on its head: in an exponential world, not making mistakes fast enough is the biggest mistake of all. The new metric was Return on Failure — small, fast, deliberate experiments over slow, perfect launches.

2026 gave this a live, enterprise-scale test: agentic AI. Analysts now expect roughly 40% of enterprise applications to embed task-specific AI agents by year end, up from under 5% a year earlier — a genuinely exponential adoption curve. But here’s the catch: most organizations iterated on the shipping part and skipped the learning part. That gap is showing up directly in the data on stalled and cancelled agentic projects.

**Verdict: Half right — the world iterated fast, but plenty of people forgot the “obsession” part means extracting the lesson, not just shipping more stuff.**

*Next up: Principle #7, Relentless Reinvention — revisited.*