In partnership with
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
If this sounds good, click the subscribe button below, add your email, read my welcome email (check your spam folder or “Promotion” tabs), and follow ALL the instructions. This is important so you don’t miss future posts.
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:
You can also skim the past posts here.
Otherwise, grab a seat 🪑.
HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 I’ve been wrestling with different versions of a scarcity mindset recently. Here are some I’m actively trying to avoid:
1) scarcity of time: saying “I don’t have time” often means you refuse to make the time, and sometimes that’s okay. But don’t lie to yourself.
2) Scarcity of decision: waiting until “I’m ready” is often a cop-out. Make a minimum viable product, and see what happens.
TOGETHER WITH 1440 MEDIA
Smart starts here.
You don't have to read everything — just the right thing. 1440's daily newsletter distills the day's biggest stories from 100+ sources into one quick, 5-minute read. It's the fastest way to stay sharp, sound informed, and actually understand what's happening in the world. Join 4.5 million readers who start their day the smart way.
LIFE
Embarrassment of choice
I’m grateful you are reading this newsletter in today’s brutal attention economy.
Every second of every day, everything wrestles for your attention. Even long-term monoliths like sleep and meals, which carved out seemingly entrenched slots in your schedule, now compete furiously with Netflix, Instagram, and alcohol.
There are more choices to make now than at any other point in history.
Let’s assume you have an open weekend. When you wake up, you have several options. You could go hiking, take a walk, or hang out with your friends. You could go to the movies, stay in and binge-watch TV shows, or sleep in a little longer. You could take that course you’ve been putting off, finally learn that skill, or call that friend you’ve been meaning to call.
Each of those options comes with sub-choices.
First, you have to decide what to wear. Jeans and a T-shirt or khakis and a button-down? Should you wear your hair up or let it down and create an oven on the back of your neck? Shorts, maybe? It’s hot outside. But you’re insecure about your legs. Should you retire one of your well-worn shirts into a house shirt? You know that once you wear it around the house, you lose respect for it. Perhaps you should just wear something ironed and decent in case you run into your enemy?
You decide to go for a walk—great. There are several trails to choose from: you could pick the shortest and most reliable one you’ve taken many times. You could take that other path you’ve been curious about for a while—it has a picturesque canopy of encroaching tree branches crowding out the sky, but it lacks streetlights. You could take that dirt road with the pretty garden you love to admire. It reminds you that you pathologically commit planticide. You could take the path that features that mansion you like to mentally play house in.
If you want to go to the movies later, you have to decide which movie to watch. Do you want to watch the most recent drop or the one you didn’t watch last time? Will you watch the other movie that’s neither old nor new, but has great reviews and a compelling trailer? Which movie theater will you go to?
You open a streaming app instead. Do you want to resume watching the show you’ve been sleep-watching for a month? Perhaps your current mood demands something light. Something you can watch while you fold laundry. Friends? A Different World? The Office, Modern Family? Parks And Recreation? Something newer, perhaps? Abbott Elementary? What is YouTube saying? Who says true-crime documentaries can only be watched at night?
You decide to finally try that new restaurant. But now you must decide what you feel like eating: Chicken? Steak? Salmon? Perhaps you can finally see what these vegetarians are always raving about?
Nah.
Should you order appetizers? Will they come earlier or—epitomizing excess and waste—at the same time as the entrée? Fries, mashed potatoes, or salad? To-go or dine-in?
This embarrassment of choices is rife today. It makes us pick the shiniest stimuli that steal our fleeting attention, if only for a moment.
But shiny doesn’t always mean best.
Your parents and their parents accomplished a lot because they may have been more desperate, but also because they didn’t have that many choices. Even the choice of marrying each other was simpler: they were probably the only educated or “well-off” people in their village, or their homes were simply close to each other. Their union was less about fate and more about geography.
To repay you for the ounce of attention you’ve expended here, I assure you of this: you will always have many options to pick from—what a privilege! But remember, there’s no perfection; there’s only choice.
TOGETHER WITH THE CODE
Daily news for curious minds.
Be the smartest person in the room. 1440 navigates 100+ sources to deliver a comprehensive, unbiased news roundup — politics, business, culture, and more — in a quick, 5-minute read. Completely free, completely factual.
THINGS
A quote
I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on the tension of being of faith in public life. The tension between accepting the world as flawed and changing what you can because God (Christian God, in my case) commands you to do so. We can’t sit back and wait for Jesus, but we also can’t fix the world completely. I’m interested in the in-between.
“…you must remember that in politics, you are dealing with sinners: sinners on the throne, sinners in the political assembly hall, sinners in the university, sinners at the voting booth, and sinners at home. Once you recognize the reality of sin, you come to the frank admission, whether you like it or not, that the word of God, however perfect in itself, yet precisely because it finds only sinners who read it, can never be fully understood. You will recognize that it's impossible to formulate with fixed certainty and lay down for all ages and all countries the principles and ordinances of justice revealed in God's word.”
A picture
Picture’s grainy, but this was such a fun weekend in D.C. with a flurry of conferences in town that brought together old friends and new friends from all over Africa. The double denim was a bold, but surprisingly well-received, choice on my part.
WORK
That’s a wrap
Sometimes your data isn’t presented the way you want it. For example, you want address data with separate columns for name and address, but instead you get this:
The WRAPROWS function can solve this like so:
=WRAPROWS(range, wrap_count,…)
range: the range you want to decipher
wrap_count: the number of rows you count before the pattern repeats itself. In our example, we have 3 rows of a name, street, and city/state/zipcode
Consider some of my spreadsheet resources below if you want to level up.
PRODUCTS
A course
A guide
FUN
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> Your name spelled out in satellite imagery
> De-AI-ify your writing
> I love some good nature photos
Have a great weekend,
— SO
