I’ve been spending a lot of time lately playing Katamari Damacy for the Playstation 2. If you aren’t familiar with this game, it’s the most original concept ever. You push around this magical adhesive ball called a katamari (Japanese: “cluster” or “lump”) and roll stuff up with it. Anything smaller than the katamari gets stuck to it; this in turn causes the katamari to grow slightly, so you can pick up even bigger stuff. In the early game, you might roll around picking up thumbtacks, paperclips, pieces of lint.. gradually you work your way up to batteries, pens, silverware… before you know it you’re picking up plates, books, cushions, milk cartons, furniture, people, cars, buildings, skyscrapers, mountains, islands, continents. In the final level of the sequel, We Love Katamari, you roll up The Sun 
I noticed that the adhesive ball model of growth actually provides a pretty good analogy for growth in general. When you enter into some new field or area of study or growth, at first everything is difficult and alien, and you have to struggle to understand the most basic of things. That’s kind of like the real life equivalent of rolling up pennies and postage stamps. As you get study and practice, you become more confident and skillful, which is like your katamari is expanding from rolling up new stuff. With a bigger “sphere of knowledge”, it becomes easier and easier to roll up stuff that was completely inaccessible before.
The really interesting thing is that this is a completely fractal process: it’s ultimately the same at every scale. Whether you’re pushing around a 5cm ball rolling up insects, or a 5m ball collecting cars and houses, or a 50m ball demolishing whole countries, the gameplay is basically the same, just with different scenery. Similarly, within some discipline, a grandmaster and a total newbie basically go through the same qualitative process, only the scenery has changed. For example, when a famous mathematician struggles with a difficult proof of a groundbreaking new theorem, the process is the same as when an undergraduate mathematician struggles with the proof of, say, the Heine-Borel Theorem. If the undergraduate tried to tackle the groundbreaking new theorem, it would be like running a 5 foot katamari into a battleship: the katamari would go flying, and the battleship wouldn’t even move But anyone who’s played KD knows, that battleship is doomed as long as the player has the patience to pick up smaller stuff for awhile.
Programming languages are a great example. When I first learned to program (in BASIC), I had to focus on picking up very simple concepts: variables, loops, individual programming commands. These tiny little concepts were like candies or pencils, just the right size for my tiny little katamari. Much later, instead of rolling up individual BASIC commands, I reached a new scale where languages themselves are the right size objects to roll up. Nowadays, I “roll up” entire programming languages with the same ease as when I used to “roll up” single keywords. In KD, you might start the game in an apartment, where the housecat is a looming monster and the couch is like Mt. Everest; but eventually, you can come back and roll up the entire apartment complex, as easily as you once rolled up a tiny little soda can inside the apartment.
Running a successful website is also similar to Katamari Damacy. Initially, you have no hope of making a significant impact on any broad area like “self-development” or “productivity tips” or “travel” or anything. At first, you’re lucky if you can get highly specific traffic (what webmasters refer to as longtail) like “summer youth hostels in takashimadaira tokyo”. These long specific keywords are like tiny little thimbles or gumdrops, perfect for “rolling up” with a tiny little website. Then, as your orb picks up an outer layer of such scruff, you’ll gradually grow reputation and respect which will allow you to penetrate into shorter keyword territory.
What lesson can we take from this analogy? Well, odds are your katamari hasn’t reached the 1000m mark yet where you can roll up the King of All Cosmos himself. In other words, if you’re like everyone else in the world, there’s still lots of room for you to grow. Don’t fret about that. The game is the same on every scale. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a billionaire or just a hundredaire, only the scenery changes.
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FURTHER READING
Skills and Metaskills
How to Train your Mathematical Maturity
The Paradox of the Heap
My Experience with Anime