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!

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.