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- #108: Thou shalt not gatekeep.
#108: Thou shalt not gatekeep.
Shem Opolot
February 14, 2025
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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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LIFE.
Thou shalt not gatekeep.
Why don’t you like telling people how much you earn?
And that nice cologne you wore the other day, why did you refuse to tell your friend where you got it?
And the results of that horrible math exam that one time. Why did you hide the paper from everyone? Did your secrecy change your grade?
Who hurt you?
Besides fake modesty or crippling shame, I can’t think of a good reason to not tell people how much you make, where you got that cologne, or what you scored on that exam.
And this is before we delve deeper into financial investments, life hacks, and the like. Gatekeeping is an epidemic.
Gatekeeping is even more fascinating today when you consider the fact that the internet basically solved it years ago. We’ll go from “basically” to “completely” once we can Shazam smells.
In Uganda, where everyone has a guy, some people will refuse to tell you where they got something. Even though that means preventing their guy’s business from growing.
Someone once told me they liked the Friday Fix so much that they gatekept(?) it…
…and I went into the subscribers list and removed them.
Okay, I didn’t do that. But I thought to myself—why wouldn’t you want more people to experience a nice thing?
Where is this innate selfishness from?
Is it capitalism wrapped in poverty? Do we compete against each other for everything? For food, for jobs, and even for fun and trinkets?
Besides reinforcing the racial and gender pay gaps, gatekeeping fractures our society and, at any given moment, places a section of society behind a large door with the nebulous words, “If you know, you know,” emblazoned on it.
I think gatekeeping sired the crabs-in-a-barrel mentality, which is a close friend of poverty, preventing people from sharing knowledge that could benefit the collective.
So…the next time someone asks you where you got that thing, tell them. Because no matter how much the self-made agenda is shoved down your throat, no one ever built anything great alone.
THINGS.
A quote.
As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.
A picture.
This is what it looked like outside my apartment when I wrote this. Can you guess what time it was?
WORK.
The end of pivot tables?
You have data:
Look at that data closely.
Until recently, if I asked you to show me the total salaries by gender so we could see how progressive your company is, you’d have to create a pivot table to get those answers.
But now—there’s a function for that!
GROUPBY.
= GROUPBY(row_fields, values, function,…)
row_fields — picture the table you want to create in your head, the row fields will be column containing the category you want to summarize; Female and Male (Gender) in this case.
values — the column with values you want to compute, Salary in this case.
function — is how you want to summarize the values. This will often be a SUM, to add up all the salaries in this case.
I manually typed out the cell references for the row fields and values, but don’t let that scare you.
Your company is within a few hundred dollars of pay parity!
PS: Your Excel might not have this function if you have an old version or a jailbroken version.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ Familiarize yourself with the cringe matrix.
✅ Do you know these kitchen hacks?
✅ Generate fancy fonts on this website.
✅ 13 wild observations on the art and science of spending money.
✅ How many jumping jacks can you do in one minute?
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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