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#117: You, you-er, you-est
Shem Opolot
April 18, 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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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 This week, I tried to work while listening to a 3-hour podcast with Naval Ravikant, the patron saint of tech bros, productivity nerds, and people who like to use words like “optimize” and “productize” in casual speech, and he said two things I’m still processing: 1) Not wanting something is as good as having it, and 2) the greatest sign of intelligence is getting what you want out of life.
#1 makes sense when you think about it, but #2…#2 sent me into a tailspin. What do you think?
LIFE.
You, you-er, you-est
Imagine these are unicorns. | Source: Unsplash
Differentiation defeats competition. Authenticity makes differentiation
For the very first time, the title of this piece preceded the text beneath it. And its contrived and grammatically incorrect form took me back to Primary 3.
After I left Buganda Road Primary School and joined Lohana Academy (henceforth referred to as Lohana) in the third term of Primary 3, I quickly recognized that the levels had changed in many ways: in the number of extracurricular activities available to me, in the much-dwindled classroom sizes, in the cluster of top performers atop the class reports.
Each class in Lohana had four color-coded streams—red, yellow, blue, and green. Pupils…yes, when was the last time you heard that word?…Pupils were placed in a stream based on their academic performance, with green having the highest performers and red having the lowest performers.
I didn’t make the rules, okay? Geez.
I joined in P.3 Blue, and after the end-of-year exams that term, I was promoted to P.4 Green and then P.5 Green, where I participated in and survived the recursive and brutally competitive game of report card snakes and ladders.
But after P.5, the school realized the system of segregating students by performance was toxic, so thereafter, each pupil was “randomly assigned” to a performance-agnostic color stream, where they’d remain until they completed primary school.
I ended up in P.6 Red.
So, “coincidentally” unshackled from the Champions League-level competition in green, I discovered complacency in red.
I topped the class from P.6 to P.7, essentially unchallenged, except for one exam round.
You see, in P.6 Red, the person who came second in the class was always second. And unbeknownst to me (yes, I know how this makes me look, but bear with me), their competitiveness grew from a flickering ember to a full-fledged flame.
And I don’t want to make them look bad, but 1) it felt like they didn’t like me, and 2) um, well, history belongs to the winners…or just those who document it first.
Okay, back to the exam round: after this particular examination round in P.7, my rival was doomed to be second again, but this time it was closer than the man behind you in a bank queue.
So guess what the rival did…
After the customary in-class review of one of the tests, while I was away from my desk, the rival found my exam sheet, screened it for errors the teacher might’ve missed, found a few I’d consciously ignored, and reported the errors to the teacher. When I returned, I was greeted by the sight of the rival’s devious smirk and the class teacher hunched over my paper, rewriting my grade and my history.
That’s how my rival topped the class that one time.
***
My least favorite part about that primary school competition was that it didn’t allow for differentiation. There was a rubric for how to succeed in that context, and if all of us followed it with the same religion and ability, we’d all win. We’d all cluster atop the class.
And it would’ve been great if we could all be number 1, but instead, teachers often pitted us against each other, warning us that the 10-year-old at the back of the class would “spoil” us.
Surely a 10-year-old can’t be Lex Luthor. But the teachers made it seem that way.
And that competition in my primary school class was similar to the competition in the animal kingdom and the competition for jobs—a brutal game of musical chairs, really.
And in many ways, this form of competition is part of life, especially for animals, with their small, primal brains, and in capitalism, because, well, capitalism. But humans, with our big brains, can flip this dynamic.
So I much prefer competition in an abundant world. In a world where there’s enough for everyone—because there is—and your victory doesn’t diminish mine. In this world, you can still be an entrepreneur. You and I can make soap, but some people will love your soap, and some people will love mine. And I’d have no incentive to steal the formula for your soap or sabotage your production line and force my soap onto everyone’s sponge.
In this very real and very plausible reality called basic commerce, you compete by doing things differently. And you can only do things differently by doing them the way you truly think they should be done.
Because you. Yes, you. The fearful entrepreneur, the fearful innovator, the timid visionary paralyzed by perfectionism—you already have everything you need.
The thing you can produce is encoded in your DNA, your unique fingerprint, and that’s your competition-beating differentiator. No one can build that thing or do that thing the way you can, so stop worrying about all the duplicates out there or the chorus of advice.
Just like no sibling grows up in the same home, and not even the most identical set of twins share the same fingerprints, your prescription for the problem you want to solve lives inside only you, and no one can replicate that.
So look inside yourself and build that thing. It’ll work if you build it honestly.
THINGS.
A quote.
Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.
A picture.
While I dislike, sorry, loathe winter and the cold, I appreciate the seasonal changes. I love how the plants change across the seasons. Same spot, but a world of difference. I hope I can take another picture in the fall.
Winter on the left; spring on the right
WORK.
Another little-known Excel function
I want to show you another way you can use one function to perform a multiplication on a list of numbers at once.
First, I use the SEQUENCE function to generate a list of numbers
=SEQUENCE(rows, [columns], [start], [step])
rows — how many numbers do you want in the list
columns — not compulsory here, but you could generate more than one column
start — not compulsory; what number do you want to start with?
step — what sequence do you want your numbers to follow?
Now that we have our numbers, let’s say I want to multiply them by 100 at once.
I’ll use the MMULT function:
Done.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ Ranking the world’s wealthiest cities
✅ This site lets you make magnetic poetry
✅ Why are some people more susceptible to allergies?
✅ A virtual tour of the Galapagos Islands
✅ How do two-way mirrors work?
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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