#133. Pay your taxes gladly.

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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 🎉 My good friends at the Mob Jazz Podcast shouted me out a couple of weeks ago, and a few new subscribers joined this community. If you’re here from there—welcome. That seat is yours if you come early. If you decide to leave, do it quietly via the back door, and don’t switch off the lights for others.

***

Now…I appreciate the unspoken rules in a given society. They let me know we have some sort of collective conscience.

For example, in barbershops before online appointments, there was always a long line behind the star barber and an empty chair behind the rookie barber. Everyone picked their line in the queue and simply avoided eye contact with the rookie barber.

Or at select train stations in DC: at the foot of the escalator that leads to the train platform, everyone at the bottom searches the faces of those at the top for haste. Haste means the train is coming, and you should act accordingly.

***

Also, I’m loving your puntastic submissions for the name of the coffee table book. Please keep them coming. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask your neighbor in a hushed tone. A little FOMO is good.

LIFE.
Pay your taxes gladly.

For my next trick, I’ll connect paths to patterns, patterns to pain, pain to progress, and lastly, progress to the “joy” of paying taxes.

While describing the communities of old, my dad referenced a well-beaten path that wound through the village like a river only contained by its banks. Except, instead of rocky banks, grass-thatched huts for homes paved the path, and as humans beat that path daily on the way to and from toil, they stopped for refreshments wherever the smell of freshly cooked food called. And the stopovers weren’t a function of opportunism, but compulsion. It was rude to resist the aroma, my dad said.

And I believed him. Because you and I know it’s impossible to visit a village home for only 30 minutes, let alone leave without being fed.

***

I liken beaten paths to patterns. We make paths once we know our destination and realize we’ll go there often, so we invest in making the repetitive journey comfortable. I imagine that’s how roads, and all infrastructure projects, happen: destination and necessity first, path second.

Patterns make life easy, but pain produces progress. Pain rewires your brain, creating new connections and forming new paths.

And forming new paths is where growth happens.

Attending your first party sans chaperone, talking to your first crush, dancing in the middle of a circle at a party for the first time, making new friends, learning new skills—these things are often “painful” in the beginning. Such is the nature of building a new path. You have to roll up your sleeves, cut the grass, wipe your sweat, clear the thorny bushes, re-roll up your sleeves, and tend to the shrubbery a little more.

It’s hard work, but the path you create services you and those who come after you for generations.

But pathmaking presents a paradox: paths make your life easy, but they can also prevent you from making other necessary paths.

David Cain used the example of using apps like Duolingo to learn new languages. You’ve used apps and websites to learn many new things, and the creators of Duolingo figured they could codify learning a language, solving years of stammering through errant phrases until you arrive at fluency. But to learn a language, the hardest—yet most necessary—part is confidently uttering half-sense for years, like children often do. Children make a joke of themselves in the process but blaze a new path that serves them for a lifetime.

But since you suffer from the fear of embarrassment (pain), you choose the beaten path on an app and hope it leads to a new destination—fluency.

And so many bad things come from you avoiding blazing new paths. From you avoiding pain.

Take that beloved community my dad romanticized.

As people leaned on community more, community leadership commanded more. For example, the choice of how many children to have became the clan’s. Dad said it was considered selfish to family plan.

But then “modernization” came with a few shiny elements, and community shrank to a smaller unit—the nuclear family.

The nuclear family typically entombed children in a compound and forced two adults to raise them on their own. In this context, bound by that burden but bent toward the benefits of modernization—of individualism—family planning and its ilk inevitably followed.

Individualism is attractive because you don’t like to pay life’s taxes.

Annoyance, inconvenience, discomfort, nosey neighbors, traditional taxes—these are life’s taxes. And since these taxes are unavoidable, you should learn to live with them. You should learn to accept them gladly.

Pay the taxes of life gladly.

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THINGS.
A quote.

One of my favorite Twitter accounts comments on modern dating—a phenomenon with which I’m fortunately unfamiliar.

A newsletter.

There’s officially one other organic newsletter in the world (out of only 2, probably), and you’ve heard about it here first.

Khaddafina is a good friend of mine. Khaddafina yielded to public demand and started a newsletter because we—her friends—felt her powers for good were being wasted. Okay, that’s not true. If you know Khaddafina, you know she did it because she wants to, which makes this even more exciting. Khaddafina is the kind of excellent writer whose gift could only be acquired by living her life—an interesting life lived openly and fully, feeling everything, like an exposed nerve. I hope to be half the writer she is one day.

A picture.

The other day, I had a conversation about access to quality healthcare and how there’s a scarcity of sanitary pads in Uganda. I remembered this picture I took in the unisex bathroom at GW. Some people lack it completely; some people get it for free.

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WORK.
Name it.

So you have data:

You want to convert the Uganda shillings to dollars. You can do this:

OR…you can name the cell with the dollar rate like this:

Now, when you’re converting the shillings to dollars, you can just mention the name in your formula:

If you want to learn more magic like this, get my Google Sheets course today.

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FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist

Shem’s picks

✅ This 17-year-old German lives on the train full-time

✅ What’s the deal with Airplane mode?

✅ Check out this interesting Airbnb category

✅ Why Sweden has so many billionaires

✅ Ad-free music for sleeping, studying or relaxing

Have a great weekend,

— Shem

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