You're busy. Your phone's buzzing with notifications, your desk's a storm of Post-It notes, and your news feed says the world's got more than enough problems to solve (...Like this "sixth mass extinction" business? Your email inbox is already a black hole of doom!)

It's easy to get overwhelmed by all that you "should" and could be doing as an entrepreneur (and, well, as a human), but isn't business without purpose just busy-ness? Be honest (we're not judging).

A metaphor describes one thing in terms of another, hopefully making that one thing easier to understand. Here are seven metaphors to help better understand the logic of entrepreneurship. The logic may surprise you, as it is not the logic taught in business school.

1. Find your flow.

Do what concentrates your motivation. Based on Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s work entitled Flow, find the work that brings you joy, where you are creating things spontaneously, as if you were in a jazz band. Who you are, who and what you know determine the means of your entrepreneurial endeavor.

There’s a paradigm shift taking place in the startup world today, notes Michael Kaplan of Phase2Advantage, an Instructional Design & Publishing company. No longer is startup success dependent upon the traditional linear model of writing a business plan, obtaining a bank loan, building a brand and then waiting for customers to show up.

The old adage of “build it and they will come” is being replaced with “build it, but only with the minimum viable product you need to test for success.”

Ground-breaking 3D hologram technology will create a virtual classroom. The new hologram is a creative innovation that will transform electronic modes of teaching. It will give lecturers and students a semblance of the classroom when they may be at home or anywhere else.

The 3D technology operates by creating the illusion of three-dimensional imagery. A light source is projected onto the surface of an object and scattered. A second light illuminates the object to create interference between both sources. Essentially, the two light sources interact with each other and cause diffraction, which appears as a 3D image.

In early July, a new resource for the remote work community launched called Remote.co. The new site is a blend of articles about remote work, a listing of remote jobs, and Q&As with remote companies. Created by FlexJobs CEO Sara Sutton Fell, it has the aim of helping out companies who are interested in remote work or already getting started with it.

FlexJobs has long been an advocate of remote work, citing benefits like lower costs, higher productivity, and higher retention rates. Since 2007, they have been connecting workers interested in remote or flexible jobs with companies progressive enough to hire them.

Agencies engaged in complementary activities related to science and technology “should consult with each other during the budget planning process to coordinate resources, maximize impact, and avoid inappropriate duplication,” and they should include summaries of these discussions in their OMB budget submissions for fiscal 2017, OMB has said.

Memo M-15-16 says agencies should label the sections of their budget submissions that involve investments in R&D; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education; STEM workforce development; technology transfer; R&D infrastructure; and scientific-collection management.

A new research report from the Society of Digital Agencies finds that in the past year there has been a dramatic spike in the number of companies who no longer work with outside marketing agencies — 27 percent, up from 13 percent in the previous year. This continues a trend The Association of National Advertisers first reported in 2013.

But these companies aren’t getting rid of marketing – they’re just bringing it in-house. Mitch Joel, president of Mirum, recently has also noticed this movement of agency talent to the client side, calling it one of the most disruptive trends in the industry right now.

Today, Andrew Saxton, Member of Parliament for North Vancouver, on behalf of the Honourable Michelle Rempel, Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification, announced $1.5 million in Western Diversification Program funding to the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO), to implement a three year initiative aimed at growing the Angel investor community in Western Canada.

Bangalore-based seed stage capital firm AngelPrime has raised Rs 300 crore ($46.82 million) for its second VC fund mostly from institutional investors from Silicon Valley, New York, Hong Kong, Europe and Singapore and a few high net-worth individuals, it said on Thursday.

Its institutional investors in the new fund include Palo Alto-based venture capital firm Social+Capital Partnership, which had also backed its debut fund. Besides Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social+Capital Partnership, Mayfield and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang were the investors in the firm’s first fund.

Boulder-based Foundry Group has closed on its fifth fund, another, $225M fund on Wednesday, the firm announced today

Speaking as a VC who interviews for our own entry-level roles, I don’t think your current pitch will necessarily hurt you, but it won’t really help you stand out either for these reasons:

Not a unique pitch: It’s actually the opposite of nonconventional to offer to work for free because the bar for making this offer is low. Many people can and do offer to work hard for free because you don’t need experience or any other value to be able to offer this.

It’s no secret that San Francisco housing prices have shot through the roof.

A home with a mummified corpse in it sold for over a million dollars. And real-estate marketplace Zumper rates San Francisco as officially the most expensive rental market in the country.

Image: Youtube/Kirsten Dirksen

It's been three years since I made the leap from successful accountant to entrepreneur. Before making the jump I read quotes from successful leaders to motivate myself. Here are some of the quotes that inspired me then and some more recent ones that have inspired me since. Whether you’ve just started a company or have been running one for awhile, there is a lot you can learn from some of the most successful CEOs. 

Think your business has to “make it” in the Big Apple or Chi-Town to pull in big dollars? Think again.

Top lines thrive in small cities, according to a report released today in a partnership between personal finance site NerdWallet and Entrepreneur Media. In the study, analysts reviewed 463 cities with populations from 50,000 and 100,000 to find some of the best climates in the country for entrepreneurship.

If you're one of the 7 billion people in this world, you probably have trouble waking up in the morning. An impetuous inventor from the UK has just solved this problem.

YouTuber Colin Furze built what he's calling a "High Voltage Ejector Bed," and the name pretty much says it all.

The authors offer this explanation of the "the journey from hubris to humiliation" that emerging market equities have undergone:

Back in late 2010, when Sepp Blatter announced that Russia & Qatar would follow Brazil as hosts of the FIFA World Cup, both China & India were on course for >10% GDP growth, EM spreads were significantly lower, and the market cap of EM ($3.7 trillion on December 1st 2010) was twice the market cap of US banks, and exceeded the combined market cap of US tech & health care. Today, the market cap of EM equities is the same, while the combined market cap of US tech, health care and banks is over $10 trillion.

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com

Here’s an interesting question—at what distance can the human eye detect a candle flame?

Put this conundrum to Google and the first answer says it is possible to see a candle flickering up to 48 kilometers (30 miles) away, considerably further than the horizon. Can that be true?

Today, Kevin Krisciunas and Don Carona at Texas A&M University in College Station put this question to the test. And the answer is considerably less than the web would have us believe.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Tech giant Google GOOG -0.26% quietly announced this week that users would no longer need a Google+ account to log into YouTube and eventually other Google sites as well. In addition, the site is breaking up into two pieces: Photos and Streams, but that’s a far cry from the market-leading integrated social platform that Google had wanted Google+ to be. Looking back, the news comes as no surprise given that Google’s answer to Facebook FB 0.86% hasn’t exactly been a resounding success.

In FY 2013, the federal government obligated $25.9 billion for science and engineering research and development (S&E R&D) at colleges and universities, a decrease of $1.6 billion from FY 2012 (5.7 percent). Eight states (California, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Texas, North Carolina, and Illinois) each received more than $1 billion in funding during FY 2013, though each state also experienced a decrease from their FY 2012 total. In total, these eight states received $14.1 billion from the federal government for S&E R&D at their colleges and universities, representing 54 percent of the government’s total. This share has remained relatively constant since 2008.

"A Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia study shows that the rise of student debt correlates to a decline in U.S. small business formation," according to the Philadelphia Business Journal. 

"Fed researchers found that small firms consisting of one to four employees decreased by 17 percent in counties where relative student debt grew by about 2.7 percent.

Across the country, these small businesses account for about one-half of the private sector economy and 99 percent of all businesses.