A call out to the young people and those of us who refuse to let age slow us down. Great advice about work and passion from fellow Substacker Todd Brison. A comparison between companies that made over $30b in combined music streaming revenues and the battle between mandatory vs. bare minimum Mondays. Finally, more advice from the writers in the room. Music and coffee finish off a long Tuesday.

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When finishing work on an article highlight or analysis, we will research the writer of the original piece and link back to the writer's page, or if they write for a publication, link to their bio page. Today's big story started as a quick Shout Out to Todd Brison when we looked him up to link back to a quote we heard on his podcast. Brison is a writer and podcaster, his podcast is on Substack, and the link to both is below.

Further research on our fellow Substacker landed us on an article he wrote last year for "Young People."  He makes two strong arguments in this piece, first is his incorrect stance on crunchy vs. creamy peanut butter – we can debate that later. Second, we agree entirely with the following:

Brison talks about his interactions with many young people and the sense of direction many of them have. His advice is based on effort and action and holds with the foundation that you can only figure out what you want to do once you've done many things you don't want to do. The central tenant in that is the "do" part; he defines a few specifics worth your consideration. The advice works whether you are chronologically young or just young at heart.

Most of us want passion; we want our life and work to mean something; Brison suggests a few exercises for separating a true passion from an interest. Take something you are passionate about and do it for 31 days – his example is writing a novel in 30 days as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). An annual writing challenge in November. Brison talks about the challenge and how despite the mental mountain, he loved doing it.

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Several stories have compared the music streaming behemoths Apple Music and Spotify. We'd like to share our overview before we dig into what the stories point out. As users of both systems, Spotify is a better application and has a slightly better library, especially for deep indie cuts. Apple is a trillion-dollar technology company, and it's reported that Apple Music was just over 2% of its latest revenue numbers. Spotify is an audio streaming company; that's all it does. 

The popular website Tom's Guide has a good comparison, numbers over numbers. On the library, Apple has a larger volume of music and podcasts. Several other comparisons from price, sound quality, and recommendation engines were all neck and neck. The one area Spotify excelled at was social media and the ability to share playlists and songs and have group edit options on an existing playlist. Here's a quick scorecard from Tom's guide:

A new movement in corporate office work has been taking shape recently. Mandatory Mondays in the office may be a reaction to something called Bare Minimum Monday. An exciting and quick podcast from Wall Street Journal called Your MONEY Briefing had the discussion. Our take on the conversation all comes down to what you need to accomplish; if you can schedule all your internal meetings on Mondays, it makes sense – if you can reset projects and check-ins and do all the Q&As, then it makes sense. The days of making workers come into an office for the sake of being at the office will be a tough negotiation in the post-pandemic and low unemployment age we are in.

A company that can streamline expectations and results will have an advantage over one that requires employees to come into an office with unscheduled meetings, more projects started than completed, and too many people running around asking what to do. Use the time, technology, and progressive work systems to enhance your work environment. It will help you grow.

A Section Header Namesake…Soul Asylum [Seeker].

Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.

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Thank you for spending a few minutes with us. Here’s one for the road!

With A Shout newsletter is written by Johnny Christian with the support of a thousand idea bits and the help of many people.

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