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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
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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 🎉 Someone on Twitter said they don’t know what’s longer: a microwave minute or watching a video while someone else holds the phone, insisting it’s hilarious. It’s a hilariously tough call, but I submit for their and your consideration—an awkward, prolonged handshake with the wrong person.
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LIFE
The Summer I Turned Pretty
A full-circle moment. Source: LinkedIn
I love Ohio.
But it’s unrequited love, one of the commonest forms of love. We feel it for our crushes, of course. But we also feel it for cities that suffocate us in traffic. For food that clogs our arteries. For dairy that makes us pay on the potty. For sports teams that lose constantly.
Last week, however, I found myself on the windward-side of an unrequited love.
You see, I introduce myself a lot these days. At work, at church, at a bar—I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said “Born and raised in Uganda.” Because of this, I've developed a shorthand explaining how I got from Uganda to the room where I must present my origin story for the umpteenth time.
But when I talk about my career in global health, I must mention Ohio.
I went to Ohio because I didn't have an immediate plan after I graduated from college, but I needed money (and to stay in the U.S. a little longer). I went to Ohio to get chipped and chiseled into a doctor by working for doctors, but I left there with friends, refined ambition and vanity, and a new career to carve out of the amorphous blob of “global health.”
One of the doctors I worked for could replace a knee faster than you take a shower. This young doctor, full of such swagger and self-awareness, vanity and vision, was a lover of profit and purpose. Working under his tutelage might’ve been one of the first times I learned to hold tension. To look at the world for what it is and what it can be.
Earning a little over minimum wage but not paying rent, thanks to the young doctor, I had enough money to build the closet I have to this day. I channeled my father’s advice, which essentially boiled down to: "Buy it nice or buy it twice." I patronized J. Crew and Ralph Lauren, buying one shirt a month until I had a full set I could go to war with. I still have two perfectly serviceable shirts from that time almost a decade ago. And the rest? My brothers "liberated" them off my back.
Watching the young doctor go about his business in that massive hospital, and learning how the system around him worked, I fell in love with health systems and health policy. I wanted to figure out how people all over the world could get the standard of care I saw at that hospital in Ohio without bankrupting themselves.
So you see, whenever I tell my global health story, I must mention Ohio.
But last week I realized that, like a single film of the same moment shot from each character’s point of view, this story has another angle.
I had the best job in college. I worked at The Center for Student Involvement—a magnet for all the students on campus. If you wanted to join a club, a fraternity, or a sorority, make new friends, volunteer, buy discount tickets to Disney World—any of the things that made the college experience enjoyable—you visited our office. And mine was usually the first face you'd see—a position that also made me part of the rapid alert and response system for all the latest baddies on campus. I was employed, not perfect.
Anyway.
I spent most of my time answering phones, responding to queries from visitors and, most unfortunately, hanging up and taking down event posters all over campus. Listen—Florida was hot. Hotter than the hottest hot I'd ever felt in Uganda. So, traversing the entire campus with a heavy bag filled with posters, tape, thumbtacks, and a stapler felt like the kind of work people's ancestors braved the seas for. The kind of work that leaves receipts of wrinkles and blisters on your hands forever.
On one such day in the summer before I graduated, I set off to tear down some posters when one of my favorite professors flagged me down. Dr. Lynch was a gray-haired and gray-bearded man with the jolliest face, often-sunburned cheeks, spectacles reinforced with transition lenses, and a spring in his step.
"Are you going home for the summer?"
"No. I can't afford it."
"That must be hard."
"Yeah…"
"One of our alumni, who runs an orthopedic practice in New Albany, Ohio, is starting an internship at his practice for students interested in going to medical school. I think you'd be a great candidate for the internship. If you send me your resume, I'll submit a recommendation for you."
I’d have never met Dr. B, been to Ohio, let alone loved it—or maybe even owned some Ralph Lauren button downs—if Dr. Lynch hadn’t written himself into my story by stopping me on that lawn in the summer heat of mid-July 2012.
As my friend Melissa said, "we never know where a conversation will take us."
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THINGS
An exercise
Remember when I said I’d like to get to know you more substantively last week? Well, if you’ll indulge me, this is it: During an All Team training at work last week, we participated in an exercise created my The Ministry Playbook.
The exercise was adapted from George Ella Lyon’s “Where I’m From” poem. They say it’s a way to help you explore your cultural identity, but it can do so much more. I particularly enjoyed the way it demonstrated the power and fragility of memory—it forces you to think back and make peace with what you can remember; with what’s important enough to commit to paper.
When completed and shared with friends (or strangers), it can show you how similar we are.
The document is editable so you can fill it out on your laptop or print it and use a pen. If you can, I recommend reading it out loud for the person or people you share it with.
If you feel like sharing yours with me, I’d love to read it and share mine. Either way, I hope you try it.
WORK
Kthanksbye
You have data:
If you want to, say, build a graph and the revenue numbers are a bit too long, you can change the revenue from “560,000” to “560K” using the pluripotent TEXT function:
“#,###,K” inside the TEXT function, is telling Excel how to use the “K.”
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
> How to plan your dream vacation
> Do you have to be polite to AI?
> The most mysterious places on earth
Have a great weekend,
— SO
