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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 🎉 Recently, a developer made an AI agent that blew up on social media, praised for its ability to take over several mundane tasks on your computer. The developer named it Clawdbot, but the folks that make Claude, the popular ChatGPT alternative, said even homophones aren’t allowed—as in you can’t create a new search engine called Googo. Frustrated but undeterred, he rebranded to Moltbot, and now Openclaw.
While battling the identity crisis, the developer expanded the platform to create Moltbook—a social media platform where only AI agents post. Humans only watch. Guess where the robot revolution will be televised.
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If your expertise is real, your system should be too.
LIFE
C’est complique
In The Witcher, at Queen Calanthe’s feast, Geralt, a most reticent and recluse witcher who grunts almost as much as he breathes, saved a cursed knight and a princess. As payment, the cursed knight offered Geralt the Law of Surprise. The law is a form of payment where someone who has saved another’s life can claim “that which you find at home yet do not expect.” Essentially, the person owed a debt can claim something the other person doesn’t yet know they have.
For reasons you can imagine, Geralt accepted the payment terms reluctantly.
When the cursed knight got home later, he learned that the princess was pregnant. The thing at home he didn’t know about yet turned out to be his unborn daughter, Cirilla, who became Geralt’s “Child Surprise.”
Over a protracted plot as the white-haired Cirilla grew and Geralt battled monsters and his own misanthropy, the two developed a special bond.
***
We’ve taken many pictures and videos of our kids since they were inkblots on sonograms, made real only by our faith in modern medicine leading us to believe that the outline on the screen and the scans—defined by the doctor’s index figure—was in fact my daughter’s head. Or my son’s peepee.
But there are still pictures or videos I wish I had.
I wish I had videos of the hours I spent assembling their cribs only to finish with several unscrewed screws remaining. The cribs haven’t collapsed yet, thankfully. Do you realize how much faith living requires? Faith, in this case being, as Luke Burgis put it: “the courage to stand before what is not of our own making.” Without faith, you’d peak as an anxiety-riddled control freak.
But we’ll tackle faith in the future. For now, lean in as I tell you what the Child Surprise from The Witcher and my kids’ cribs have in common—the difference between the complex and the complicated.
Yuen Yuen Ang explains the difference well:
Complicated things are made of many separate parts that do not adapt to one another or the surrounding environment—machines are good examples…
When dealing with machines, processes are linear and outcomes can be controlled. Press a button and a toaster will produce a predictable action: crisp, warm bread pops up.
Complex is the opposite of complicated. Whereas machines are complicated, systems are complex. A system is made up of interconnected elements that adapt to one another and the environment, for example, a tree…
Armed with a manual and some tools, assembling my kids’ cribs was tedious but linear, complicated only by my own impatience and my wife’s glare—because I’d put of the assembly until the last minute, of course.
Tackling many of life’s challenges appropriately involves distinguishing the complicated from the complex. Complicated things are fixable with a manual and the right tools, but complex things are, well, complex—requiring, at minimum, intentional deliberation, planning and the best intentions. And even then, your best efforts to tackle complex problems could go horribly wrong.
Implicit in tackling complex problems is great risk.
You know this if you have any leadership experience whatsoever. As Bernard Crick put it, democratic governance cannot make all sad hearts glad.
But also implicit in tackling complex problems is surprise.
While walking through bustling African cities, if you look past the poverty and chaos, you witness the incomparable innovation the people muster to survive. All manner of hardware shops where anything is possible, mobile money, open air restaurants serving the best food and germs you’ll have in your life. Most of these things are simply magic, born from interconnected pieces of a system trying to fit in the system while fighting for elbow room. This is also why I can think of few things harder than being a mayor of a major city.
You must know when you’re dealing with a complicated problem or a complex one. If the problem is complicated, find the manual and a screw driver. If the problem is complex—raising a child, running a business, falling in love—you must have faith. And though, like Geralt, you might be reluctant, don’t shy away. Lean in. Submit to the unknown, the complex, because while there’s risk, there’s also so much wonder, so much surprise.
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THINGS
A quote
Art has always been in a dialectical push and pull between tradition and the avant garde: ‘art is when there is a realistic picture of a landscape, or a scene from Greek mythology’ versus ‘a urinal can be art if an artist signs it’.
An article
I enjoy almost everything David writes, but this piece is one of those that feels timely now, but has actually always been timely.
WORK
*Fries*
You want to count the number of orders of fries to make based on the data in column C, but people do the most sometimes. Fortunately, we have an asterisk (*) for that:
We use COUNTIF to count the appearances of “fries”
The asterisk tells Excel to find the word “fries” within the COUNTIF function regardless of whether there’s some text before or after it.
Fries* — searches for instances when there are words after “Fries”
*Fries — searches for instances when there are words before “Fries”
No prizes for guessing what *Fries* searches for.
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
> A free screen recording tool
> Find your next book by swiping openings like you’re on Tinder
> Scroll through Wikipedia like Twitter
Have a great weekend,
— SO
