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- #153. Test and see.
#153. Test and see.
Shem Opolot
January 09, 2026
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 Did you miss me as much as I missed you? Stop lying to me. Out of roughly 2,000 of you, only my mother asked me when the newsletter would return. There’s a big mango in my throat. Is this what unrequited love feels like?
How was your holiday? I spent most of mine living out my fantasy as a house husband, making delicious meals for my family, and being as present possible.
LIFE.
Test and see.
Your word of the year is “experiment.”
Every now and then tech bros, academics, and publicly elected thought leaders on the internet have arguments about IQ, with some referencing old and quite frankly, junk science written by, quite frankly, racists. Of course, in this narrative, Africans are idiots cursed by God, who must also be—in their paradigm—racist.
I despise that junk science because it manufactures consent for all sorts of heinous actions meted out to Africans. Some people use it to justify colonialism and slavery. Or worse, some Africans lap up these stories, contributing to defeatist ideologies, and constant catastrophizing.
For me, any powerful assertions about human nature flaunted as fact must be subjected to scientific rigor. To experimentation that can produce repeatable results in Washington, D.C., Timbuktu, Kansanga, and Mongolia.
Speaking of experimentation, I believe in God. And I’m fully aware of my hypocrisy here. But I’ve also contemplated a thought experiment the comedian Ricky Gervais articulated well recently:
If we rebooted the world today, wiping out all traces of religion and any such ideology, we’d rediscover gods, just in different forms. But if we wiped out science, it’d be rediscovered the same through experimentation.
Experiments are also useful for non-scientific purposes.
I don’t believe in that IQ points nonsense, but undoubtedly there’s a level of intelligence required to solve problems. Some people are smart enough to tackle a difficult problem and come up with a solution on the first try. But you’re probably not that kind of person, I’m afraid. For you, experiments are your salvation. With experiments you can tackle that problem a thousand different ways, like a maths student requiring fresh paper for every new attempt. With each attempt, you collect data to refine your approach until you figure it out. That’s how experiments work. That’s how planes fly and rockets go to the moon.
Experiments are also good because they are less affected by emotions. Gathering information is the goal. This is how you should approach life decisions this year: as tiny little experiments with small or big data dividends.
***
The year is new and you’re hoping for the best. Newness—even the illusion of it—does that. That’s why you like to start new things on Monday rather than immediately. That’s why you like nice, round new things: a fresh page, a fresh week, a fresh day, a fresh year.
You’ll fail this year.
In small ways, I hope. But maybe in big ways. Make peace with this now. It’ll be okay.
While watching my favorite NBA team capitulate under the pressure of a full court press in the dying minutes of a game, I thought of the players.
You see, you and an NBA player have different relationships with failure.
NBA players are the top 0.1% of basketball talent on the planet. Most athletes who make it to the NBA have been winners their whole lives. Most of them were the best player in their neighborhood, their hometown, their state, their country. Before the NBA, they won a lot and developed a deathly disdain for losing—for failure.
But in the NBA, they go from being big fish in small ponds to regular-sized fish in a regular-sized pond. And the competition is stiffer than a teenage boy’s intentions on prom night. This competition, plus the highest volume of games they’ve ever had to play, makes failure inevitable.
NBA players must reframe what failure means on a nightly basis: as an opportunity to learn. As an experiment.
But this reframing requires such delicate mental gymnastics. Enough to forget losses quickly, but avoid the complacency that can make them accustomed to losing. They must make failure useful, rather than be crippled by it.
You should do the same.
The losses will come. Expect them. Embrace them. Reframe them. Learn from them. And move on.
THINGS.
A quote.
The deeper one sinks into our nation’s alleged man-boy problem and its potential solutions, the more the woman reader may begin to feel something stronger than resentment or intellectual disdain. She may begin to feel a chauvinistic gratitude in her sex. The familiar flatness of feeling a little degraded seems preferable to the anger, entitlement, and alienation that (we are told over and over) gnaws away at so many male specimens. What a gift it is, really, to have no choice in the matter. To have to move out of your parents’ house, to show up for your shift, to change the diaper, not because any of it is gender-affirming but because life is full of tasks that need doing, and you are the person who does them. At least then you know who you are.
A picture.
My babies are here and I can’t fully describe the joy and gratitude I feel spending time with them. And I know every parent thinks this, but my kids are such funny individuals, so I know they’re going to be just fine in life.
Less than a minute after this picture was taken, my 4-year-old son walked back to the car by himself. He told us to find him there. He was done with the cold. He also asked to return to Uganda.
WORK.
Did you know you could do this?
You have data:
If you wanted to create a visual representation of the number of items sold, you could use data bars, which is a bit more common. Or sparklines, which are less known but also the next best option. Orrrr you can use the even less known REPT function like so:
The result is several bars or sticks which seem unintelligible right now.
The first argument in the REPT function allows you to insert a symbol (“|” in this case), and the next argument allows you to repeat that symbol a number of times equal to the figure in the selected cell (150 in this case).
Once we have those 150 bars, we change the font of that cell to “Playbill.” Don’t ask me why—that’s the way it is.
This makes the bars look more intelligible.
Now we can copy our formula downwards:
Done.
Add taking my course to your new year’s resolutions.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> Can you pass this S. Korean English exam?
> Try travel roulette. No visas required.
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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