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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.
Why should you subscribe?
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
I comb through tonnes of self-improvement content so you don’t have to, and I distill the content into bite-sized wisdom for you
I’ll occasionally make you laugh
If this sounds good, click the subscribe button below, add your email, read my welcome email (check your spam folder or “Promotion” tabs), and follow ALL the instructions. This is important so you don’t miss future posts.
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 🎉 Today marks the beginning of a new era for the newsletter. I’m so glad you clicked that email. A few changes you can expect:
Ads. I went back and forth on this for over a year despite the fact that 98% of you said you wouldn’t care about my inclusion of ads. They’re here now, so we’ll see how you really feel. Full disclosure: Every time you click them, I get pennies, so please click them? 🫣.
Designated products section. The products I sell (the course and guide for now), have their own designated section.
Polls. Toward the end of each issue, I’ll give you the opportunity to rate the issue. I won’t use your feedback to write what you want, because, well, that’s how enshittification happens. I’ll use your feedback to compile future coffee table books by cherry-picking your most popular issues.
These changes are a big deal for me because this newsletter is essentially my third child. The Friday Fix will always be free, so the ads and product sales are the only ways I earn from it. I’ll continue to experiment, so please tell me what you think early and often. I hope you continue to enjoy this fix.
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LIFE
Don’ tire
Uganda’s government shut off the internet after promising its citizens it wouldn’t.
Israel is still committing a genocide in Gaza.
America has abandoned the political euphemisms it has long used to mask its bad manners on the international stage. And unchecked bad manners breed more bad ones, so today it’s Venezuela; tomorrow it might be Greenland? Nigeria? Iran?
Russia is poised to win the war it’s been waging against Ukraine for over a decade, with the countries that previously linked arms with Ukraine and adorned their statuses with the Ukrainian flag now telling it to concede.
Emboldened by America’s bad manners, and their own historical brand of impunity, China is circling Taiwan by sea, hoping to finally claim what they believe to be theirs. No one has the moral authority to oppose them.
Lagos is still the generator capital of the world, with the total number of people disconnected from the power grid big enough to fill a top-five most populous country.
We’re likely in end-stage capitalism, where only profit and meretricious markets matter until the system cannibalizes itself. Tech companies have formed a small kumbaya circle where they each borrow from Peter to pay Paul. Company X invests in Nvidia’s chips, but Nvidia’s chips are expensive, so Nvidia invests in Company X, so that Company X has enough money to buy more of their chips. These are the investments privileged over the employment of thousands of staff who are being laid off. One wonders who will use all this AI when no one has jobs that require emails to be summarized. Data centers are stressing the power grid and they require clean water—but human beings don’t, apparently.
There are wars and rumors of wars. And conspiracies will gain more traction than common sense. But don’t be fooled. Assumptions of cabals curating your reality are often overstated. And even if they’re real, they can’t curate your conscience unless you let them. Don’t let them.
Worse, resigning to invisible or strawman cabals prevents you from holding actual people, structures and systems to account. In that way, your indifference might manifest the very cabals that take advantage.
More often than not, people are mindless not malicious. Most people aren’t as smart as you think. Most people aren’t thinking about how to screw you over.
Rage against the tide of despair. Of helplessness. Do not get tired. Do not get tired.
There’s still space for you in this world. There are still things you can do. Do not surrender your agency. You must, as Albert Camus put it, have pessimism of intellect that allows you to interrogate your reality constantly, but have the optimism of will, believing that things will be alright. As long as the problems you see are man-made, then man can fix them.
Do not yield to mind melding groupthink. To trends and fads that turn all of us into a hive mind. Question things. This isn’t individualism, it’s individuation to make you a more useful part of the collective. You must know what role you play. Instead of looking around waiting for someone else to make things better, you can make things better.
You can just do things.
THINGS
A poem
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
A picture
I had my first speaking engagement for work yesterday. I spoke to a room of about 70 people about the history of global health. I enjoyed myself. I think they did, too.
WORK
SPLITsville
You have data:
Ignore the absolute mess of the names and focus on the “Location” column. To separate the city from the state, we use the TEXTSPLIT function in Excel (or SPLIT in Google Sheets):
Most people only need to know this about TEXTSPLIT:
=TEXTSPLIT(text, col_delimiter,…)
text — the text you want to split
col-delimiter — is the unique (and repetitive) thing in the text you want to use to perform the SPLIT (the hyphen in our example), which must be wrapped in quotation marks.
PRODUCTS
A course
Sheets for People who Hate Sheets
This course is designed to take you from zero to good enough, even if the last time you opened a spreadsheet was by accident. We'll start with the basics—no judgment—and build from there.
A guide
How to learn Excel
If I had to learn Excel again, this is what I’d do.
RATE IT
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> 80 interesting questions to ask instead of “how are you?”
> Hopefully we never have to find out: can humans survive by eating only humans?
> The most exciting museum openings this year
Have a great weekend,
— SO
