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- #103: What I learned in 2024
#103: What I learned in 2024
Shem Opolot
January 10, 2025
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Happy Friday 🎉 I can’t even front—I’ve missed you. A lot. Twice, I almost wrote to you, but I decided to give it a rest. That, plus vacation was sweeeeet.
Today’s life anecdote was written by a good friend of mine who preferred to remain anonymous. After reading it, I thought it would be the perfect read to start the year.
But first, I need your help. Almost 1000 people read The Friday Fix every week, and I’d love to get to know you better. But since I don’t have 1000 outfits—let alone the funds—for 1000 dates to sit across from you in a bedroomly lit restaurant and ask you for your favorite color and your pet peeves, completing the survey below will help me get to know you better, so I can improve the newsletter. The survey takes only 2 minutes to complete, and honestly, it’s so well designed you’ll actually enjoy taking it. All your responses are anonymous, so I won’t know who you are (unless you want me to), so please be candid.
It’s going to be a good year!
LIFE.
What I learned in 2024.
Source: Dora Arévalo Ibarra via Pinterest
I have wanted to be a doctor my whole life.
In 2024, I was accepted into the medical school of my dreams and embarked on the journey of a lifetime. I was 30.
When I look back on the past few years of my life, I understand more deeply the story of Joseph. Joseph was a young boy from the land of Canaan who underwent a series of seemingly unfortunate events that landed him in the right place at the right time. Prison. But along the way, Joseph never lost favor with God, and the Lord made it so that whatever Joseph did, he did well. Through grace and mercy, Joseph left prison and served in the King’s court, second only to the Pharaoh.
I know that prison well.
I spent the better part of my 20s laying in the dark, curled into a fetal position, trapped in prison. Unlike Joseph, though, my mind was my prison. I struggled with a depression so deep that all my energy went into sleepless nights spent crying and weary days spent pretending I was okay. Whenever I sat down to study for the MCAT, write a paper, or do anything that required silence and focus, I was flooded with the memories of childhood traumas, a slew of broken relationships, ghosts of sexual assaults, and a long string of perceived failures.
I was convinced I was broken.
But while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden.
One day, in 2020, after a particularly heinous depressive episode, I decided to go on a run. I ran until I couldn’t run any longer, then I went home and sat in silent meditation. The next day, I did it again. And again, the day after. I joined a church, I planted a garden, I went on long hikes, I fed the homeless, I started therapy, I read my Bible, I prayed, and I cried—a lot. I sat at tables with brilliant intellectuals, I published papers, and I learned more than I could have imagined. I’ll never know who exactly the wardens of my prison were, but looking back, I know that with them, I found favor:
I met a friend who persuaded me to get help, so I found a doctor. I met an advisor who told me to get a graduate degree and apply to medical school, so I quit my job and went back to school. I met a professor who believed in me and offered me a teaching assistantship that paid my way through. It was hard, and I hardly found time to eat. I met a friend who was previously a caterer, and week after week, home-cooked meals showed up in my fridge until the day I graduated. I met a therapist who taught me the miracle of self-compassion. Along the way, I thrived, and slowly, I learned that I was never broken to begin with.
I was simply landing in the right place at the right time.
No one knows exactly how long Joseph was in prison for, but we know that he was sold into slavery at 17, making it even more powerful when I read:
Pharaoh took his signet ring from his finger and put it on Joseph’s finger. He dressed him in robes of fine linen and put a gold chain around his neck. Joseph was thirty years old when he entered the service of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
So, though starting medical school at 30 may sound like a nightmare to some, to me, in 2024 I left prison and entered Pharaoh’s court.
As I reflect on what I learned in 2024, I still don’t have an answer. But I can say for sure that I am beginning to understand the power of grace and mercy.
In 2025, I pray that the Lord, too, shows you kindness and grants you favor in the sight of man.
THINGS.
An excerpt.
This is also one of the best things I’ve read this year so far. I wish I’d written it.
A picture.
I took so many pictures in Johannesburg. I’ll soft launch them over the next few weeks. But we’ll start with this picture of the Ferris Wheel at Gold Reef City that I loved.
WORK.
A new function.
I bet you haven’t heard of this function before.
You have data:
You want to count the total sales for a specific department—say, “Clothing.”
You could use several functions, such as SUMIF or SUMIFS, but I want to show you a little-known function called DSUM.
=DSUM(database, field, criteria)
database - a table or an array
field - the column containing the values to be added up
criteria - An array or range containing zero or more criteria to filter the database values by before operating.
The entire table is the database; “Sales” is the field in the database with the money values we want to add up, and selecting “Department” and “Clothing” makes our criteria known.
Because we selected the range containing “Department” and “Clothing,” changing the department automatically calculates new total sales for that category.
💡 Bonus: If you format the database as a table (Format > Convert to table in Google Sheets or Ctrl + T in Excel), adding new department sales to the database will automatically update the sales total.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ Your next job interview could be with an AI.
✅ The best photographs taken without Photoshop.
✅ A library for old websites.
✅ Can you guess these famous companies’ original names?
✅ Struggling with procrastination? Make it a game.
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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