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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 🎉 One of my favorite things about cultivating new relationships is witnessing how a stranger’s face changes in your perception. The same features that initially huddled up tightly to conspire to repel all strangers, soften over time. The cheeks get fuller, the jaws relax, the crease between their eyes dissipates. Instead of sharp, steely features, you see freckles and patent wrinkles. I love it when someone tells me someone dear to me looks unapproachable, because I knew that person they speak of—or rather, I didn’t know that person, but now I do. And I can no longer relate to that initial impression.
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LIFE
Samesies
Why does everything look the same?
Several months ago, I bought a knock-off version of arguably the most beautiful loafers I’ve seen this year. Once you see their price, you’ll understand my financial choice. The fact that the original loafers are sold out tells me two things: 1) There’s a whole world of people out there who can afford $1,300 shoes, and 2) my eye for nice things isn’t unique.
“Broooo! I dig your shoes, man. Are those the YSLs?” a chummy guy I met at a party inquired after my dupes, referencing YSL’s—if you can believe it—more expensive copy of my beloved, overpriced loafers.
“Nah, these are knock-offs; ‘preciate you lying to me, though. I got these for like a hunnid bucks. I can send you a link.” I did the Lord’s work.
“A hunnid?! Send that link, bro. I was tryna get them joints but that price was crazy. I seen ‘em everywhere on IG, and I usually don’t do trends but them things is nice.”
Before social media, most people got their fashion cues from television shows and music videos. I also received those cues, but my parents chose character development for me. If they were lucky, guys tried baggy denim shorts, Timberland boots, and colorful striped button-down shirts with jeans à la Nelly in the My Place music video. The ladies tried low-rise jeans, spaghetti strap tops, dress tops, sequin skirts and dresses, ballerina flats, peep-toe heels, and bell bottoms.
Social media accelerated—if not democratized—this process of turning us into copycats. If I asked you what aesthetic you want for your dream house, it probably matches some trope you’ve seen online. Don’t feel bad. How else can you gain inspiration? You must copy to create.
Humans learn, grow, and survive by copying. In the early stages of development, babies copy everything from their caregivers. To survive, our ancestors copied hunting techniques, handwashing, and starting fires with stones.
But most of us, when survival isn’t on the line, still stop at just copying.
A copying pandemic collapses our reality into dull sameness. And we can see this everywhere: the sans-serif-ication of nearly all high-fashion logos; the conversion of every new building in every major city into some permutation of steel, glass, and concrete; the new apartments with the same marble counter tops, large glass windows, and anemic open-floor concepts.
This, too, isn’t always bad, though. Often, just copying suffices. If you need shoes, why design and make them from scratch when you can just buy the ones your friend has?
However, when a technology like AI conspires with capitalism, it worsens sameness. If the AI-generated event flyer pandemic of the day isn’t bad enough, we also begin to see more copying to optimize, not harmonize. Instead of responding to our surroundings, we respond to capital, to efficiency. I’m no architect or engineer, but I don’t think the buildings in Dubai, Ireland, Johannesburg, and New York City should look the same. And yet, a lot of them do.
The antidote to the copying pandemic is taste.
Taste is the last frontier in the AI age. As it gets harder to know what’s real, people will earn lots of money to simply determine what is good. And you know those people. Those are the people with evolved individuation, constantly creating offshoots to mainline sameness with their defiance. Those people who made Sambas cool, even though they’ve been around for close to a century. Those who dared to make phones fully touchscreen. Those who made overalls fashionable to wear outside work, and then those who wore them with one strap unhooked. Those who made minimalism attractive, and are now preaching earth tones.
But over-commodifying taste would be a mistake. Taste, principally, as Prof. Ruby Justice Thelot at NYU puts it, ensures our existence harmonizes with nature. It ensures we “know how to deal with abundance, so that abundance doesn’t wreck our society.”
Fortunately, you don’t need to, nor can you, develop taste in every area of life. But you can cultivate it in the areas in which you have the most passion by combining knowledge, curiosity, and love.
You acquire knowledge by copying—reading and learning as much as you can from others. Curiosity lets you use that knowledge to ask questions, experiment, and iterate. Love merges knowledge and curiosity by providing the fuel to embark on the journey in the first place.
So…the next time you work on a passion project, you should copy to gain inspiration. But as Cole Schafer says, you should stop looking for inspiration exclusively within your own industry. This is how a jaguar (the animal) becomes a Jaguar (the car). This is how things stop looking the same.
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THINGS
A quote
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
A picture
On this day, I had the best ice cream I’ve had all year and then stumbled upon these cuties.
WORK
Not equal
In Excel, most people know how the symbols for greater than, less than, and equals (>,<, = respectively). But “not equal to” doesn’t get enough love, I feel. The symbol is ‘<>’.
I complicate a simple problem below to show you the symbol in action:
COUNTIF here is counting the number of occurrences of “Out of Stock” by excluding the “In Stock.”
In the example above, and often, it might be easier to just use equals or even just type “Out of Stock” directly as a criterion. But sometimes, it’s easier to exclude than to include and in those cases, the ‘<>’ comes in handy.
PRODUCTS
A course
A guide
FUN
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> How deep is the ocean?
> Can you pass this notoriously hard Chinese entrance exam?
> A list of islands you’re not allowed to visit
Have a great weekend,
— SO
