# The 26 Principles, Revisited: A Nine-Month Reality Check
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## Article Content
A companion series to the original 26 Principles of Exponential Growth — checking my own math, principle by principle, nine months in. Nine months ago, I sat down to write my annual end-of-year series — 26 Principles of Exponential Growth: Mastering 2026. Twenty-six days, twenty-six disciplines, one framework: a Discipline to master, a Self-Reflection Question to ask, a Metric to track it, an Action to take right now. The whole thing was built on one idea, borrowed from an old story about a king, a chessboard, and a very stubborn inventor of chess: exponential growth looks like nothing for a while, and then it looks like everything. Rice on a chessboard starts as a handful. By square sixty-four, it’s a mountain the size of Everest. I wrote those 26 principles as a bet on where the mountain was headed. So now that we’re three-quarters through the year the series was written for, it’s time to do what I just finished doing with my 30 Megatrends — go back through every single one and ask the only question that matters: what actually happened? Starting today, I’m running a companion piece to each principle — same 26, same order, same discipline — but with a short, honest “where we are now” attached. Did the mindset hold up? Did the world move faster than even I expected, or did some of this age badly? No cherry-picking, no victory laps I haven’t earned. One caveat up front: I’m not redoing this daily. It’ll run weekdays only, so figure five-plus weeks to get through all 26. Consider it a slower burn than the original sprint — fitting, maybe, for a series about pacing yourself against acceleration. First up tomorrow: Principle #1, Temporal Literacy. Given what’s happened with AI model releases alone since I wrote it, I think you’ll agree — the lag I warned you about didn’t shrink. It got worse.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/09/the-26-principles-revisited-a-nine-month-reality-check/