The New Adventure

***Today is our third day open - lots of browsers today! Quite a bit of downtime too - guess people are still finding out about us. I'm confident we will pick up. We're getting lots of compliments on the store, kinda fun to be here and talk to the customers that come in. What a difference from how I was spending my days before!

***The Rise of the Rural Creative Class. This is interesting.

One of the most persistent myths in America today is that urban areas are innovative and rural areas are not. While it is overwhelmingly clear that innovation and creativity tend to cluster in a small number of cities and metropolitan areas, it’s a big mistake to think that they somehow skip over rural America.
A series of studies from Tim Wojan and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service documents the drivers of rural innovation. Their findings draw on a variety of data sets, including a large-scale survey that compares innovation in urban and rural areas called the Rural Establishment Innovation Survey (REIS). This is based on some 11,000 business establishments with at least five paid employees in tradable industries—that is, sectors that produce goods and services that are or could be traded internationally—in rural (or non-metro) and urban (metro) areas.

***Trump withdraws from Iran nuclear agreement. I think this was the right thing to do. It was flawed from the very beginning.

***All leaders have anxiety. Here's how the best ones deal with it. 

It's no surprise that anxiety is common among the entrepreneurially gifted, says Sarah Wilson, author of the book First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety. "It comes down to brain function: their ability to think beyond straight data and to hyper-connect," Wilson says. People with high levels of anxiety "are able to think very broadly across multiple ideas all at once. Which lends itself, obviously, to creating a business."

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There was a farmer who sold a pound of butter to a baker. One day the baker decided to weigh the butter to see if he was getting the right amount, which he wasn’t. Angry about this, he took the farmer to court.
The judge asked the farmer if he was using any measure to weight the butter. The farmer replied, “Honor, I am primitive. I don’t have a proper measure, but I do have a scale.”
The judge asked, “Then how do you weigh the butter?”
The farmer replied;
“Your Honor, long before the baker started buying butter from me, I have been buying a pound loaf of bread from him. Every day when the baker brings the bread, I put it on the scale and give him the same weight in butter. If anyone is to be blamed, it is the baker."

Moral of the story: In life, you get what you give. Don’t try and cheat others.

***Did you know? from Readers Digest

There’s only one letter that doesn’t appear in any U.S. state name

You’ll find a Z (Arizona), a J (New Jersey), and even two X’s (New Mexico and Texas)—but not a single Q.

 

Samsung tests phone durability with a butt-shaped robot

People stash their phones in their back pockets all the time, which is why Samsung created a robot that is shaped like a butt—and yes, even wears jeans—to “sit” on their phones to make sure they can take the pressure.

 

The “Windy City” name has nothing to do with Chicago weather

Chicago’s nickname was coined by 19th-century journalists who were referring to the fact that its residents were “windbags” and “full of hot air.”

 

Armadillo shells are bulletproof

In fact, one Texas man was hospitalized when a bullet he shot at an armadillo ricocheted off the animal and hit him in the jaw.

 
***"Nurture great thoughts, for you will never go higher than your thoughts." - Benjamin Disraeli