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- #118: Ready or not...
#118: Ready or not...
Shem Opolot
April 25, 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 🎉 Sometimes your kids have easily observable milestones: they roll over onto their belly, they sleep through the night, they feed themselves, they string a sentence together, etc. And these milestones are magical.
But sometimes the milestones aren’t as easy to observe before it’s too late. Like it taking your son locking himself and his sister in the bathroom and then taking forever to unlock the door for you to realize it’s time to hide all the keys in the house.
***
Also, quite the eclectic mix of new songs in the playlist. Check it out!
LIFE.
Ready or not…
You can appreciate things, people, moments, experiences, without the need to control them.
I remember sitting in a huddle of wooden desk chairs with the six friends in my biology class whom the school had randomly assigned to the same cubicle. We were the magnificent seven, waging war against the squeaky wheel of A Level in Uganda.
And let me tell you: I’ve studied a lot. PLE, UCE, UACE, college physics, calculus, health economics, game theory, MCATs, GRE, aptitude this, aptitude that. Name it; [it feels like] I’ve probably taken it. And even now, as I type this, I’m preparing to sit for my doctorate comprehensive exam, which will shift my tassel of academic progression from doctoral student to doctoral candidate. A minor revision, if you ask me, but academia is nothing if not pedantic.
But out of all the schooling I’ve done, A Level was the hardest by far. Under the tutelage of teachers who didn’t always wish us well—if they showed up at all—we had to cram roughly 4 years of content into two years and balance that with being peak adolescents. But we really just wanted to have fun, listen to Rick Dee’s “Weekly Top 40” on Saturday mornings, play sports, visit girls’ schools, and write letters with suggestive R&B song dedications we had no business singing.
But A Level was hard.
And we knew it, but sitting in that cubicle, laughing at God knows what, while occasionally checking the windows for the reflection of the teacher-on-duty whenever the block sounded uncharacteristically quiet, we seized every moment to enjoy ourselves.
Maybe too many moments, even.
And we were so smart and naively optimistic that one of the things we said often—when guilt seeped into our conversations and we realized a whole night prep had gone by without us figuring out organic chemistry—was:
“We shall have read by then.”
***
Fast forward nearly two decades, and not much has changed.
I planned to get married at 35.
It’s a peak perk of male privilege. You can just wake up and decide when you want to get married and make minimal moves to make it so.
By 35, I thought, I’d have all the infrastructure required to be a good mate—an apartment, a good job, a connecting beard, you know, the works.
I’m 35 now, and I barely have any of those things, but I’m married. Happily, even. Mostly by the grace of God.
***
You see, when the exams came, we weren’t exactly ready, but we did okay, and when we look back on A Level, we remember the times our books were closed.
And when I met my wife, five or six years ahead of schedule and “readiness” notwithstanding, it became clear the bells weren’t going to wait for 35 to toll. Not if I wanted her.
So I just kept texting her.
I believe in many ways people are the same throughout their lives. You start out like some sort of blob of clay, possessing everything you need to be your best self, but time and molding reveal the pot.
So you can do those scary things now, and rest assured that your future self will probably be okay.
THINGS.
A quote.
Another example of how fleeting originality is: I stumbled upon this video of Slavoj Žižek disparaging one’s search for one’s “inner self,” and it reminded me of this quote from VV. In short, they say—you can’t fully know yourself, nor should you try to.
You are more interesting and multi-faceted than even you yourself typically realize. Consciousness has a way of functioning as a sort of centralised propaganda department. You don’t actually have to be constrained by your narrow assumptions and expectations of yourself
A picture.
I miss my babies.
WORK.
AI in Google Sheets
If you can articulate yourself well enough, you might get away with getting AI within Google Sheets to perform a function for you.
=AI(instruction, range)
instruction — is what you want the AI to do; text must be in quotes
range — the range of data you want the AI to reference or act on
To start small, I asked for the mean of a set of numbers, and it returned the right answer:
This technique isn’t faster than using the AVERAGE function, but I suppose it would help someone who doesn’t know what function to use.
Play around with it and see what you think. Honestly, I haven’t used it much.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ Some the most unusual landscapes in the world
✅ Go and delete yourself from the internet
✅ Play Snake, but on the world map
✅ The science of optical illusions
✅ Another simple task manager if you need it
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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