What is iteration?

Iteration is a different strategy than linear growth

With linear growth, you build something and keep adding to it over time. With iteration, you build something, throw it away or dismantle it, and rebuild it again from scratch with the information from the first build.

You can see they are different because linear growth adds on to the same foundation; iteration rebuilds the foundation too, based on the information from the final product.

These are fundamentally different ways of thinking. In high tech and engineering, they have compared them. And although it doesn't make a lot of sense — because you are rebuilding the same structures two or three times — iteration actually reaches robust solutions faster and more efficently.

It's hard to throw things away

When things aren't working there is a cognitive bias called "sunk costs". We put energy into the bad solution and don't want to admit we wasted our time.

But this is a mental game, we didn't waste our time if we learned a better way to do things. Its really important to realize when we're acting or building under the sunk costs fallacy.