Another late entry, the first week in January is a great week to purge, organize, and set up.  Regular work will filter back in as people come off holiday vacations, and I plan to work on the first public push to introduce With A Shout to a larger audience.  First up today will be a quick recap of the programs we started yesterday, and then back to the news and music for Monday. 

Crazy people go swimming, and we talk about time currency and Americans who drink.  Yesterday was also Public Domain Day, but we won’t tell. Welcome to the show.

The program starts on Monday, January 2, 2023 – but the information has not been received yet.  The status is pending, could be a Stoic thing?

Day 1 introduces some of the research used to put the challenge together.  A discussion on a Harvard research project from 1938 involving 724 participants.  The study continues today and is called the Havard Study of Adult Development.  The initial participants were tracked over their lifetimes and interviewed at various times.  Some of the participants donated their brains to the study after their deaths! 

Reading the study and the findings, I was reminded of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People.  My manager gave me the book in my early work days and told me it might help me become a better manager.  Unfortunately, I did not become a better manager, it did help with starting a business and even more when it came to sales, and it is all about relationships.

The start-up quiz was quick and easy and asked questions about where you think you are in your relationships.  After the examination, the site gives you a text-based result.  My result:

Printed out the summary of each book and program.  This week's plan is to determine priority and create a reading schedule for the books and a program schedule. The goal is to first get through the 21-day challenges and 7-day relationship series and new books and programs afterward.

A reaction to the realization of the amount of work going through programs could take, several posts about time popped into my memory.  Nike Goke wrote a post yesterday about his first billion.  Nik is a successful writer and entrepreneur, but he was talking about time not money, something people have been trying to buy for a long time. 

In a post from this weekend, Sahil Bloom also talked about time; he showed a chart that mapped out days vs. decades – the perspective is evident and provoking at that same time.  Another author of a book called The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin, says, "The days are long, but the years are short."  In Nik's post, he talks about a third of his life being over and feeling good and bad about it.

In the end, you live, learn, and the seconds keep coming.

In a story George Costanza can relate to, crazy people around the globe celebrate a new year with a dip in the ocean.  Spend 5 minutes with The Guardian, trotting through the globe and seeing the ridiculous joy in people about to jump into, in some cases, cold water.

The news site Gallup did a story on the percentages of Americans who drink.  Over the last 80 years, the rates stayed close to 60%.  More than half of us drink, and with more drugs becoming legal, it will be interesting to see if alcohol consumption drops.  Another interesting finding, beer was preferred over wine and liquor in the 90s; last year, it's barely holding on to that lead at 35%, with wine coming in at 31% and liquor at 30%.

The writer and comedian Neal Brennan also has a take on booze in America.  Listen to his 3-minute bit on drugs here:

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Initially written for a Disney movie that never was…

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