Excerpt from the book Good To Great by Jim Collins

Picture a huge, heavy flywheel - a massive metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle, about 30 feet in diameter, 2 feet thick, and weighing about 5,000 pounds.  Now imagine that your task is to get the flywheel rotating on the axle as fast and as long as possible.

Pushing with great effort, you get the flywheel to inch forward, moving almost imperceptibly at first.  You keep pushing and, after two or three hours of persistent effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn.

You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster, and with continued effort, you move it around a second rotation.  You keep pushing in a consistent direction.  Three turns...four...five...six...nine...ten...it builds momentum....eleven...twelve... moving faster with each turn...twenty...thirty...fifty... and hundred.

Then, at some point-breakthrough!  The momentum of the thing kicks in in your favor, hurling the flywheel forward, turn after turn... whoosh!... its own heavy weight working for you.  You're pushing no harder than during the first rotation, but the flywheel goes faster and faster.  Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort.  A thousand times faster, then ten thousand, then a hundred thousand.  The huge heavy disk flies forward, with almost unstoppable momentum.

Now suppose someone came along and asked, "What was the one big push that caused the thing to go so fast?"

You wouldn't be able to answer; it's just a nonsensical question.  Was it the first push?  The second?  The fifth?  The hundredth?  No! It was all of them added together in an overall accumulation of effort applied in a consistent direction.  Some pushes may have been bigger than others, but any single heave - no matter how large - reflects a small fraction of the entire cumulative effect upon the flywheel.

This is what we are about at GHS, all of us, together, working and pushing in a collective effort to serve our students and improve our campus.  Our work helps to define who we are and what we stand for.  WE ARE GOLIAD! EVERYONE COUNTS!

Emilio Vargas III
GHS