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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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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 The other day, while involuntarily eavesdropping on a conversation on the Metro, I overheard someone call boxed wine—and all cheap wine, really—“cardboardeaux” and I—I absolutely hate it when people are funnier than me.
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LIFE
Teachers
Meeting several professors on my college campus trip has reminded me why I love teachers so much.
You see, when you grow up in a poor country, most decisions you make are about survival.
Even your hobbies aren’t immune to the malaise of monetization. You can’t just take a walk or hang out with your friends in peace:
“What if…what if we created an app that shows you all the good places to walk? Wouldn’t that be neat? What if we created an app that allows us to plan our hangouts better?”
Nonsense.
Anyway.
School, particularly, more than a means to learn and improve oneself, is a gateway to prosperity. In fact, if you find yourself in a classroom, you’ve already overcome terrible odds to win a hefty lottery over millions of people. When you sit in that classroom for the first time, a choir of your ancestors stands over your shoulder with their arms linked side-by-side and no room for Jesus in between, belting out, “No pressure!” in a booming baritone.
Because of these stakes, every immigrant you meet abroad shares your experience of parents with impossible and rigid standards.
Doctor, lawyer, engineer or bust. They weren’t rigid because they wanted to be, as my wife says, “where fun goes to die.” You needed professions that ensured you could make enough money for not just you, but the whole family to succeed.
These constraints color one’s procession through education systems.
Therefore, if I ask you to think about your favorite teacher(s), you’d close your eyes and think for a second. And then your mind would reach back in time to a period filled with hope, promise, and despair. Hope and promise, because you were young; despair, because learning is hard.
Basic arithmetic first, then all the numbers began to vanish from maths, and the teachers tasked you to “find” them by asking you to find x; memorizing tribal migrations—all of it can be brutal.
Teachers are stewards along that journey, making the load easier to bear.
I categorize my favorite teachers into two tiers: the good and the great. The good ones had an advantage—I already liked their subject. What made me like them was their unique ability to breathe life into the dull and animate the static. They made biochemistry a window into the miracle of life, instead of just one of the hardest subjects I’ve ever taken. They made English grammar an art, making me fall in love with words, tenses, and sentences.
But the great teachers did all those things while battling my resistance. Sitting in a class you were forced to take was sort of like attending a standup comedy show against your will. You sit in the back row as a matter of survival and protest. Survival, because the front is for those who are comfortable being punching bags for a comedian trying to land; protest, as a last bit of defiance, daring the comedian to make you laugh. The great ones take that challenge and turn it into your unrestrained, guttural laughter.
My dissertation chair is a great teacher.
But more than that, she’s part of a dying breed of academics who love teaching and recognize the weight of their responsibility as several bright eyes—and some sleepy ones—stare at them during two-hour classes. She stewards that responsibility well and somehow midwifes a generation of people like me who swore off teaching as a vocation, but now consider it viable.
She transforms minds, hearts, careers, and lives. She replaces herself more times than she knows. What greater compliment is there for a teacher?
As a steward yourself, of whatever you steward, what greater compliment to your success is there than to sire generations of stewards after you?
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THINGS
A quote
When someone says, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” it implies that Rome will get built eventually by the way you’re going about things now, but there’s no reason to believe it works like that. Romes don’t get built very often.
A picture
I struggled to take a picture from this place that could do justice to what I saw without getting stopped by the cops for suspicious behavior. I took this photo in West Palm Beach, Florida on another one of my college campus trips. This particular street is on the billionaires’ island which, I was told, has a total of 65 billionaires. I saw so much opulence in the form of bedazzled gates, floral fences culminating in ornate, organic arches, elaborate fountains with water spouting from unassuming orifices, enough white linen and sunglasses to clothe a small village, and, believe it or not, beachfront infrastructure protecting underground tunnels that led to more private beaches—beyond what my squinting eye could accommodate.
📍 Worth Avenue, Palm Beach, FL.
WORK
Find me #2
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 add a description to it:
Click the three dots, go to “File information” and then “Details.”
A details window will open on the right and you can enter a phrase you will remember at the bottom:
Since Google Drive’s search feature indexes the descriptions of files, it’ll pull up this document when you search “find me”
Tune in next time for #3.
PRODUCTS
A course
A guide
FUN
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> Reuters attempt to unmask Banksy
> A new word game from the guy who gave us Wordle
> Doomscrolling, but for articles to read
Have a great weekend,
— SO
