When I first met Stata in October 2000, my golf handicap was 27 and my game was going nowhere slowly. Ten years of intensive Stata therapy later, my handicap is 17.3 and falling. It would, of course, be nonsense to infer from this data that lowering your handicap increases Stata use, but could the reverse be true? Could there be a causal relationship between increasing Stata use and a decreasing handicap? In this presentation, I argue that, yes, there is. Granted, Stata might not work along the lines of traditional golf training aids, but rather its effect is mediated through a third factor, namely time. Golf consumes time. Stata produces time. In this presentation, I will demonstrate how minutes in Stata's programming world are equivalent to hours in the real world, and by the use of programs within programs, minutes can translate to days. Although extrapolation from an N of 1 is nearly always dangerous, I believe that Stata could be similarly used to reduce your weight, improve foreign language skills, or even increase research output.
