Milton Hershey wanted to make chocolate, which requires sugar, which during the First World War became both scarce and controlled by an American refining trust that had a near-monopoly and no particular reason to be generous.
So in 1916 he went to Cuba and bought a sugar plantation.
A plantation gets you cane, not sugar, so he built a mill. Then he bought more plantations — Central Rosario in 1920, Central Carmen and Central San Antonio in 1925, Central Jesús María in 1927 — and built more mills, and then a refinery, because milled sugar still isn't refined sugar. The mills needed power, so he built an oil-fired power plant with three substations. The sugar needed to reach the port, and Cuban roads in 1916 were not going to do it, so he built an electric railway.
The railway needed people to run it and the mills needed people to work them and those people needed somewhere to live, so he built a town, Central Hershey, about thirty-five miles east of Havana, finished in 1918, with houses and free public schools.
All of that is downstream of "make chocolate."
The same thing happened in Pennsylvania
Hershey, Pennsylvania was the original version of this. The chocolate factory needed milk, so there were dairy farms and a creamery. The workers needed a town, so there was a transit company, a construction firm, a lumber company, water and electricity and telephone service, sewage, a laundry, a department store that also sold hardware and farm implements.
And then a park. And a zoo. And a cemetery, a nursery and a greenhouse, because at some point you have built an entire functioning society and society requires a zoo.
None of that was scope creep. Every item on that list existed because something else on the list couldn't happen without it. Pull out the power plant and the mills stop. Pull out the railway and the sugar sits in a field. It's a genuine dependency chain, and Hershey followed it as far as it went, which turned out to be very far.
The other kind of growing list
Almost nobody's to-do list grows this way.
The lists most of us carry around grow by accretion — a thing gets added because it occurred to us, or because someone mentioned it, or because it seemed like it might be good to do sometime. Nothing on the list is holding anything else up. It's just a pile that gets deeper, and the depth is the problem, and the depth has no relationship whatsoever to what actually needs to happen next.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. A list where item four is blocking items five through nine is a list with a shape and an order and a correct first move. A list of twenty unrelated items is twenty separate arguments you're going to have with yourself.
Which is why we built Flows
IHC looks at your tasks and works out which ones are holding up others — Flows, in the app: dependency chains, the Hershey structure, made visible in a list that would otherwise be flat.
Then the ♥ score weights it. A task that's blocking three other things is not the same size as a task that's blocking nothing, even if they take the same twenty minutes and even if you'd rather do the other one.
Hershey ended up with a railroad because he followed the chain honestly and didn't stop halfway. Most people's projects stall because the one unglamorous blocking task sat in the middle of a flat list looking exactly as urgent as "reorganize the photos."
We build the list that knows the difference, puts the load-bearing thing first, and gets you to the end of it.
Sources: Hershey Community Archives, IEEE Spectrum, Milton Hershey School.