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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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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 When you increase the volume on your TV, do you stop based on the sound you hear, the volume number indicator, or both?
I listen for the perfect sound, but also, the volume number must be divisible by 5. If 24 is the perfect volume, we’re going to have to bear 25, I’m sorry.
LIFE
The box
After two back-to-back weeks of visiting college campuses, having conversations with students and faculty about global health policy, I’ve probably had easily over 100 conversations. About global health’s colonial legacy, about redesigning global health architecture, about Texas barbecue, about the unwalkability of most U.S. cities, about reimagining what a different world can look like. It was exhilarating, it was enlightening, it was exhausting.
I love talking about big things. I started out as someone who loved details—a data analyst—but now “paying attention to details” is trite, confined to my cover letters and job interviews. But the problem with focusing on big things is that there’s no forest without single trees. You must care about some details.
During one of the many deep and big conversations I had, this professor let out a deep sigh, visibly excited but overwhelmed.
“Lord,” she said, after a long pause while fidgeting with the many rings on her fingers and looking off in the distance, “what is mine to do today?”
I loved that phrase. I added it to my lexicon immediately. And a day later, I had the opportunity to use it.
After my presentation at a student-led symposium, a graduate student approached me and asked me a challenging question:
“Your career path is not linear. How do you navigate a career in a world that’s full of boxes—accountant, doctor, analyst, etc.—when it’s clear everything is connected?”
I also let out a deep sigh, paused and fidgeted while looking off into the distance. It made so much sense for a public health student to ask me that question, but somehow I was still surprised by it.
Ahem:
This box-versus-connectedness problem is common in health. A physician wants to treat a patient, but the more questions the physician asks, the clearer it becomes that the disease or the “presenting complaint” is the least important thing about the patient’s condition. Yes, their stomach hurts, or they’re bleeding out, or they are pre-diabetic, but the real problem often sits “outside” the physician’s box: they don’t have a decent place to live, they don’t have nutritious food to eat, they don’t have insurance. After a set of questions, the patient quickly becomes a political simulacrum, and though the physician knows this, they must ask themselves, “What is mine to do today?”
Some physicians ask themselves that question in some sort of tiered, temporal sense, constricted by urgency and agency:
“What can I do about this day to day, month to month, year to year?”
On the day, they must tend to the pressing bleed in the emergency room; on the month, they must figure out what caused the bleed at home, and sometimes the problem stops there. But if it doesn’t, then on the year, they must advocate for a political solution to the systemic problem.
Now, of course, this contemplation of “mine-ness” varies by physician. Some will simply write a prescription, some will inquire about the patient’s living situation and make context-specific recommendations, some will call their friend who runs a homeless shelter and connect them to the patient afterward. All these physicians “do their job.”
This varied mine-ness, put together, results in health system changes to accommodate this obvious but invisible interconnectedness—this political everythingness. This is why we have concepts like “osteopathic medicine,” “holistic medicine,” “human flourishing,” or, more simply, this is why some health facilities have social workers—there to receive a soft handoff from a physician who has done their job on the day.
Like the physician, you must be competent enough to do your job well, humble enough to know where your role ends and another person’s begins, and possess the peripheral vision to see, as much as you can, how everything fits together.
Everyone has a role to play.
For a while, despite the mess you see, you’ll be powerless to change things, to influence things, but you should still do your job well. But as time passes, as you grow, as you gain more responsibility and autonomy, as your scope widens, you’ll be able to redesign for that interconnectedness, for that political everythingness in your peripheral. You’ll be able to pull different people into the room to share notes, to connect dots, to nurture the forest, to fabricate wholeness.
Don’t be threatened or discouraged by the box. Instead, understand it, understand all the other boxes and their respective tenants, and wait for the right time to connect the dots.
THINGS
A quote
There is no longer a compelling story for why we’re here, what we should build, or who we serve. In the absence of myth, life becomes a loop. And loops do not reproduce…
Until meaning returns, the birth rate will fall. And it should. A culture that forgets why it exists should not expect to endure.
A picture
Another one from visit to Baylor University in Waco, Texas. The elephant in the room really pulls everything together if you ask me.
📍 Cameron Park, Waco, TX.
WORK
Find me
So, you’re in your Google Drive and someone shares an important document (which you can’t edit) with you and you want to store it somewhere where you can find it quickly.
You can “Star” it:
Starred files will appear in the left menu under “Starred.”
Tune in next time for #2.
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
> Why you should suck at your hobby
> A color guessing game
> Need help decluttering?
Have a great weekend,
— SO
