đ Good morning from Florida! Iâm Michele, and this is The Right Note, a mix of the most interesting things Iâm reading, writing, and learning about this week.
âYou are always just one decision away from a completely different lifeâ.
I love this saying.
It makes me appreciate my life and everything in it, knowing it could all change instantly.
But it is inspiring, too, knowing that when things are not perfect, I am one decision away from bliss.
I think about this idea a lot in terms of people's happiness but also from a business perspective.
There is a very thin line between brilliant innovation and absolute failure.
So many valuable products in the worldâthat we use every dayâwere created by accident.
Kutol Products had become the worldâs largest wallpaper cleaner manufacturer in the early 20th century.
Unfortunately, things began to change in the 1950s for Joseph McVicker, the founder of Kutol Products. With the transition from heating with dirtier coal to cleaner oil, gas, and electricity, sooty buildup on wallpaper was no longer an issue in many households.
There was no longer a need for the cleaning goo he had invented.
McVicker was trying to turn around the struggling company when his sister-in-law, Kay Zufall, read an article about how wallpaper cleaner could be used for modeling projects.
Zufall, a nursery school teacher, tested the material with children and discovered that her kids liked squeezing the goo more than hard modeling clay.
So she suggested to her brother-in-law Joe that they color it and call it Play-Doh.
According to The Strong National Museum of Play, known for the mesmerizing way it descends downstairs, the slinky was created by naval engineer Richard James.
Trying to develop a spring that would keep equipment steady on ships, James knocked the coiled metal off a ledge and saw the incredible effect it had.
He showed his wife Betty the accidental invention, and she had the idea to make it a toy.
Kenneth and Ruth Graves Wakefield owned and operated the Toll House Inn, a tourist lodge in Massachusetts.
One day Ruth went to bake chocolate cookies for the guests, but she found that she was out of baker's chocolate. She chopped up a Nestle semi-sweet baking chocolate bar to improvise, thinking that the chocolate would melt and spread into the batter.
However, the chocolate didn't melt into the batter but just softened. Although it wasn't what she was planning, Ruth served the cookies, and they quickly became a hit.
She reached an agreement with Nestle, whose semi-sweet chocolate bar sales were growing like crazy. The company was allowed to print the "Toll House Cookie" recipe on their packages while supplying Ruth with all the chocolate she needed (unlimited chocolate is great, but I hope she also got paid!)
After trying to make the bars easier to cut, Nestle transformed the product by making bags of semi-sweet chocolate morsels (chocolate chips) in 1939.
âïž Quote of the Week
The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.
â Elbert Hubbard
These stories prove that we're all just a small adjustment away from making things work.
That's all for this week.
đ See you next Friday,
Michele