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- #106: Dust or diamonds.
#106: Dust or diamonds.
Shem Opolot
January 31, 2025
Hi! Welcome to The Friday Fix! You’re reading this because you probably stumbled upon this post somewhere on the internet instead of where it should be—in your inbox. But no worries; we can fix that.
Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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I have over ten years of work experience in healthcare, program management, and data analytics on two continents. So, I know a little about helping you work smarter
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I’ll occasionally make you laugh
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Hi! I'm Shem Opolot, and this is The Friday Fix, my weekly newsletter. If you've received it, you’re either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter (yes, I’m the kind of person who uses words like “latter”) camp and want to subscribe, then click on the shiny button below:
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Otherwise, grab a seat 🪑.
Happy Friday 🎉 If you don’t know what the card game sometimes called “matatu” is, then, I’m sorry, but skip this part.
Okay, the rest of you, come to the front. What rules do you play matatu with?
Jokers or no jokers?
Pick 3?
In a group game, if 3 consecutive players play a 2, how many cards does the fourth player, who lacks a defense, pick? 2 cards or 6?
Can you end a game on an action card (an ace, 8, J, etc.)?
Are aces (asking cards) color-agnostic? For example, can I use the ace of diamonds (A in diamonds) on top of a flowers card to ask for hearts?
Please let me know. Lives are at stake.
LIFE.
Dust or diamonds.
Close your eyes and think of a moment when you were happy.
You can’t close your eyes and read at the same time, so pause here and think of that moment.
***
The first moment that comes to my mind is a Need to Breathe concert in a basement at the University of Central Florida in 2012. The only light in the packed room came from the spotlights on the stage that traced the band members out of the darkness. It looked like the audience assembled at the foot of the stairwell to heaven—pitch-black darkness, with a distant light commanding all our attention.
The music was great, but I didn’t know any of the songs, so I hummed and swayed along awkwardly while everyone else seemed to share the same nervous system.
At the penultimate moment when artists usually tease their exit, the band members unplugged the circulatory system of cables that pumped life into the basement, and the spotlight squinted to focus on the lead singer, who mounted a high stool with a banjo in hand.
It was dead silent.
In his raspy but honey-glazed voice, the lead singer performed the best rendition of Ben E. King’s Stand by Me I’ve ever heard.
I wept.
***
But sometimes you can only process the “happiness” in retrospect.
In 2014, sandwiched between a potential career in medicine and a career in global health, I spent a year unemployed. No papers to be in America legally. No income. No place to live. So I moved in with my host parents in Lakeland, Florida, where I took care of their grandkids in exchange for room and board and learned that a pool table is quite possibly the heaviest thing on earth as I assembled pool tables for extra cash.
Don’t ask. It’s a long story.
Throughout that time, I exercised every day because one should try not to look like their problems, but deep down, I was unhappy. I felt like life was racing past me. When my friends weren’t buying land and getting job promotions, they asked me to buy them stuff online because the assumption was that everyone in America had money.
I didn’t correct them.
But today, when I look back on that period, I remember watching Game of Thrones episodes with the family and plunging into fan fiction shortly after. I remember dressing up as Santa Claus for the kids and watching their eyes light up. I remember learning that I got into Duke and celebrating over lunch, seated next to a hilarious, old lady who had never interacted with a black person before.
***
Most philosophical texts focus on the mystery of our existence and the secret to happiness.
And sometimes you get caught up in semantics and miss the point. You try to distinguish happiness from joy or contentment, even though you tacitly know what you yearn for.
There are those who, when asked about happiness, refer to what I like to call “pockets of sunshine,” where life is a winding, unpredictable river, without happiness as an estuary but just a creek to cradle in for a time. These people urge you to seize those pockets of sunshine, to acknowledge them, to revel in them. To cry at a concert.
But Jonny Thompson distilled happiness into three pillars: pleasure, moderation, and goodness.
First, like unemployed Shem in 2014, happiness doesn’t always equal pleasure. You hate being in school, but you remember the good old days when you look back. You find raising children exhausting and pray for the times when they’re older, but you stare at their baby pictures with fondness and nostalgia.
Second, happiness lives in the middle. In moderation. This is why your diet is most likely to work if you schedule some days to eat ice cream. And why you’re more likely to be productive if you schedule time to work and time to binge-watch Love is Blind. More often than not, you’ll achieve better results pursuing balance.
Third, happiness requires goodness. If you’re good to people, good things will happen to you.
So…are you happy? You can be. But one thing’s for sure: sometimes you have to submit the monsters in your life to time or fire to see if they turn to dust or diamonds.
THINGS.
A quote.
It’s late January, so this one is for you if you’re still second-guessing doing that thing.
The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.
A video.
If you’re remotely curious about my experience as a father, I spoke about it on a podcast for an hour.
A picture.
You’re gonna get these Joburg pics if it’s the last thing I do. It doesn’t look like it in this picture, but I squatted as far away as I could before petting the cubs.
WORK.
This one’s niche.
You have data in different sheets (in the same workbook), and you want to copy data from one sheet to another or just view both sheets at the same time.
For clarity, two different sheets in the same workbook look like so:
Btw: You can rename sheets by double-clicking the default name and typing the name you want.
You have a table, and you want to convert the items in the “Category” column to dropdown lists since there are only three options: Technology, Automotive, and Other.
But this isn’t about how to create dropdowns. If you want that, watch this.
This is about how to view both sheets (one for your table and the other for all dropdown options you create) in the same window in Excel.
1. Navigate to: View > New Window, after which a duplicate window will open.
2. In the first workbook, return to View > Arrange All and check the “Windows of active Workbook” box and select “Vertical.”
Done. You should have two identical sheets open. Any changes made in the second sheet will update in the first one.
Here’s what it looks like on a Mac:
PS: This might look slightly different on a PC, but the concept is the same.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ How to defuse tense situations at work.
✅ Sweden is building the largest wooden city in the world.
✅ 10 must-see museums opening this year.
✅ Do you know how mountains are measured?
✅ Time to check in: fitness trends experts hate.
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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