The classic Banach Contraction Principle assumes that the self-map is a contraction. Rather than requiring that a single operator be a contraction, we weaken this hypothesis by considering a minimum involving a set of iterates of that operator. This idea is a central motif for many of the results of this paper, in which we also study how this weakended hypothesis may be applied in Caristi's theorem, and how combinatorial arguments may be used in proving fixed-point theorems.