Seth Godin wrote a recent post about layering. Here’s an excerpt:
Someone asked me which post on this blog represented the turning point of its growth. The ‘breakthrough’ post. It turns out that there wasn’t one. Instead, there were 2,500 posts, one after the other, each building (and I was learning from each) as we went.
This reminded of Jim Collins’s analogy in Good to Great. He likens success to spinning a flywheel. Picture a massive metal disk, 30 feet in diameter and weighing several tons, mounted on an axle. You don’t spin it fast with one single heave; it takes many smaller shoves. It takes a lot of hard, sustained effort to get it up to speed, but once it’s moving it’s virtually unstoppable.