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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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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
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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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Otherwise, grab a seat 🪑.
HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 Waymo, the company at the forefront of driverless technology, and a threat to special hires everywhere, is hiring DoorDash—a food delivery app—drivers to close their car doors. Because while the cars can drive themselves, they cannot shut their own doors if hurried and thoughtless humans leave them ajar. During the robot uprising, the robots will come for those thoughtless humans first before those of you who don’t tell ChatGPT “Thank you”.
TOGETHER WITH PIQUE
The Cozy Winter Ritual Behind My Energy and Glow ✨
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LIFE
Courage Community College
Getty Images / GraphicaArtis / Contributor
“What do you do to stay sane, Shem? Knowing that a lot of the work you’re doing might be fruitless, or completely undone by bad actors, how do you keep going?”
I had the best work call in my life this week.
I connected with a family medicine physician named Joyce, who, in a fit of passion, talked for 30 minutes straight about her childhood, her career, and the reason she chose the path she chose.
Joyce was a sickly child who grew up in a poor household. Her parents struggled to put food on the table, let alone meet her healthcare needs.
“My family needed a doctor like me, but we could neither afford one nor find one in our hometown.”
So, despite being teased repeatedly by her classmates in medical school, who pointed out the obvious—that family medicine was at the bottom of the pay totem pole in the U.S.—she told them the same thing:
“My family needed a doctor like me, but we could neither afford one nor find one in our hometown. I want to be that doctor for someone.”
Overcoming her health issues, graduating top of her class, and excelling at everything she did, Joyce became that doctor.
But serving a predominantly poor, Black and Brown population weary of being abducted in raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, it’s even harder for Joyce to be that doctor. She has to toe the line, between taking services to this now-skittish population and risking her medical license.
Wrestling with that tension, that’s when she asked me: “…How do you keep going?”
I couldn’t help but feel like my situation paled in comparison to hers. Yes, global health is imperiled, but it always has been. If anything, we’re in a much better place now. And yes, I’ve seen the horrors vulnerable people face in seeking care, in being emaciated by disease. But in that moment, global health hadn’t ever felt quite as personal to me as her patients do to her.
But then, fortuitously, Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire came to mind.
In the book, Xeones, accompanied by Bruxieus—a blind slave and tutor of Xeones’ family—suffers from survivor’s remorse after witnessing and escaping the death of his family and his city. Both of them starving in the wild, Bruxieus, whose bedside manner could’ve used some work, tries to cheer Xeones up:
"Listen to me, boy. Only gods and heroes can be brave in isolation. A man may call upon courage only one way, in the ranks with his brothers-in-arms, the line of his tribe and his city…”
Bruxieus imparts a powerful philosophical concept: courage is social, not individual.
This concept didn’t land for me instantly. Especially since I can think of many individuals I consider courageous. Courage seemed to be this force born out desperation that forces us to lift ourselves out of quicksand by the strands of our own hair.
But then I remembered two things: that courage almost always comes from familiarity—from the fact that we’ve seen courage before, that it is possible, and therefore can be emulated—and that I couldn’t be a successful basketball player without my teammates.
When I played basketball, I started as the new guy on the team, left-handed and only able go left. I was terrified before every game, worried about my limitations, worried about losing, worried about letting the team down. But I was encouraged by the better players on the team, knowing that if I did my part, they’d lift us to victory. Then one day I became the best player on the team the newbies looked up to. And before every game, I was still terrified.
Where was I supposed to find my inspiration then?
I gained inspiration from knowing that there were many successful captains before me, and that I had teammates and therefore I didn’t have to do it alone.
We won the Regional Championship when I was 16. I wasn’t the best player on the team, but it was the first time we implemented a zonal man defense. You see, defense in basketball usually takes two forms: man-to-man coverage or zone. In man-to-man coverage (sometimes just called ‘man’), every player picks an opposing player to guard and tries to stick to them like glue the entire game. Man is great if the teams are well-matched in size and skill. But if there are significant size/skill disparities, zone coverage allows each player on defense to guard a specific space and compensate for each other’s weaknesses.
Zonal man is a hybrid of man and zone, turning the defense into an orchestra with each defensive player on the same string. It requires trust, commitment, communication, and courage.
We were unbeatable, not because we scored many points, but because our opponents couldn’t score on us.
Our courage was symbiotic, combining the knowledge of those before us with the confidence from linking our arms together.
So I told Joyce: I keep going because I know global health history. I know how far we’ve come, and I don’t fight alone.
Whatever mountain you’re facing, others have scaled it before you, others are scaling it right now, and you don’t have to scale it alone.
TOGETHER WITH KAJABI
One Platform. Every Product.
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THINGS
A quote
A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.’
A picture
My idea of snow, before I experienced the reality, was cold but bright white. But that’s true for like one day after it snows. The rest of the time it is debris, and I appreciated the humor in the picture below, poking at fun at the city’s struggle to clear it.
WORK
DGET
You have student test data and you want to display specific details (grade, status, points) on demand:
We want Eleanor’s status, grade and points in this case.
You could create a dropdown of all the student names, and use a lookup function like XLOOKUP to pull the details you want, OR, you could use the DGET function:
=DGET(database, field, criteria)
database — is the table you’re pulling all your data from (A4:D16 in this case). The cell references ($) are used to tell Excel to lock in on that range
field — (and this one can be tricky) refers to header/column title in your database you’re interested in (B1 in this case). You could also manually type “Status” instead of pointing to cell B1 in the example, but B1 is better because you want “Grade” (C1) and “Points” (D1) after.
criteria — the criteria we’re searching for (A1 and A2 in our case because we’re searching for a “Student” named “Eleanor”). We must use the dollar signs to lock in that reference because we will always refer to that range.
Once our formula returns the Status, we can copy it across to get the other details. The cell references ($) allow us to do this by telling Excel to lock in on certain ranges. The easiest way to understand how cell references work is to try and do the same calculation without them.
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.
FUN
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> In case you need help calculating your total bill for subscriptions
> A global map of cost of living
> Half the world’s languages come from one language
Have a great weekend,
— SO
