After reading this, I was reminded of one of those "survive in the wilderness" shows I saw a couple of weeks ago that had a great quote at the beginning (a Tanz

After reading this, I was reminded of one of those "survive in the wilderness" shows I saw a couple of weeks ago that had a great quote at the beginning (a Tanzanian proverb): > Little by little, a little becomes a lot I think this might be a better real-world representation of the concept described in the post. I get the impression that the flywheel metaphor implies something positive, whereas the proverb strikes me as much more ambiguous (and a little more menacing). Technical debt is the first thing that comes to mind. That being said, one of my favorite bosses of all time used the flywheel metaphor to encourage the engineers at our consulting company to build cool things to put out in the world when we were on the bench. He wanted us to be seen as a really cool organization with talented people. Unfortunately, the company ended up going out of business. As a developer, it always blows my mind when I look at something large I (or others) have built and wonder how it was able to get done. It's a culmination of small efforts spread out over time, until you wake up one day and realize the result is something impressive in scope. I think that might be my favorite part of being a programmer.