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- #135. Eating an elephant
#135. Eating an elephant
Shem Opolot
August 22, 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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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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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 My baby girl had her first day of “school” this week, and it went about as well as you’d expect—tears, clinginess, and a dramatic separation at the threshold of her classroom akin to the stuff at customs and border control. But at pickup, she smiled wider than I’ve ever seen her smile. It was a new smile. A smile I didn’t know she had in her. The best smile she has in her, I imagine. If there’s a better one, it’ll solve all my problems forever.
And I managed to capture this smile on camera.
If you see me, please tap me on the shoulder and ask me to show you that smile. It will make your day, I promise.
LIFE.
Eating an elephant
How do you eat an elephant?
Suffering is essential.
Wading through a swamp barefooted—with thickets tugging at your shins and creepy critters hitching a ride on your wet flesh—is where growth happens. Your blistered feet muddied and throbbing in pain. Mysterious movements in the shrubbery flanking the almost-path. That kind of path often leads to prosperity.
But I hate unnecessary suffering.
On your journey to individuation, there are paths only you can take to go where you need to go: to figure out if your beliefs are truly your own, to find purpose, to be a better version of yourself.
But many paths have already been pruned and paved by generations of people unfortunate enough to be examples—unfortunate enough to have waded through the swamp barefooted. So you don’t have to beat parallel paths next to theirs.
There’s no reason for you to figure out how to do your job well on your own. That problem is already solved. That path already exists. How to run a home? Solved. How to buy property? Solved.
***
I started my YouTube channel to eat an elephant.
People I worked with struggled with rote tasks that had been solved, so I stood at the side of the footpath, like an old man in the village sweeping the path with an old broom, and showed them the way to the well.
But then I realized this small outbreak in my office was an epidemic. People all around me were struggling with the same already-solved tasks. So I sat in front of that camera and braved the awful sound of my own voice to offer a vaccine.
Then, I realized the epidemic was part of a larger, silent pandemic of people building parallel paths and failing miserably—because building paths is hard.
There are so many things in life we should know but are never taught. Like the fact that you should pursue your dreams lest you resent yourself and—in extreme cases—those who pursue their dreams. So I want to build a repository of pruned and paved paths.
This project has become the elephant on my plate.
Practically, I want to build a video library of life lessons. Figuratively, I want to collect the wisdom that latched onto the embers emanating from the evening fire that prolonged the night.
How to think, how to make decisions, how to run a home, how to achieve financial independence, how to deal with grief, how to be a nice person, everything.
It’s a massive elephant.
I imagined I had to find 100 experts to teach 100 topics and record 100 courses, then place them on an online platform that would bankrupt me or consume enough power to plunge a small town into darkness—whichever came first.
This elephant became Sisyphean, threatening to cause death by details, and the pall-bearer was procrastination.
So, instead of mortgaging my family’s future on a pipe dream or languishing in procrastination purgatory, I made a YouTube Channel, and later—a course. The course is the smallest, lowest-risk test of the dream. Two tiny bites out of the elephant. My minimum viable experiment.
With the channel and the course, I pummel the hard earth encasing my big dream with a pickaxe, chipping away one pebble at a time, until a glint of the dream shines through a crevice.
So…how do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time.
THINGS.
A quote.
Everything you know is filtered, biased, and incomplete. Everything.
A picture.
I call it “school” because baby girl just plays and sings songs all day.
WORK.
A nice addition in Google Docs
If you’re lucky, the next time you open a Google Doc, you’ll notice a tiny but mighty and nifty addition—an audio button that allows you to listen to the tab in a voice of your choosing.
I mostly use it to embed a “Listen to this tab” option at the top of the document for my friends who think listening to audiobooks counts as reading books.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ Why does this forest in the middle of Uruguay look like a fingerprint?
✅ How Google Translate uses maths to translate hundreds of languages in real time
✅ Life hacks courtesy of Reddit
✅ What’s so special about the human brain?
✅ Free online tools for battling anxiety
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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