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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 🎉 This week I learned that there are people who shower while facing the shower-head and I…
TOGETHER WITH HUBSPOT FOR STARTUPS
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LIFE
Screenshots
Take a screenshot!
Not literally, silly.
About a decade ago, my wife took her first literary screenshot when she released her first book. And that, kids, is how I met your m—how I met her.
Most screenshots are an attempt to capture something for some immediate or future purpose. Therefore, sticky notes, journals, diaries, inscriptions on papyrus, and rock paintings are all upstream from the modern screenshot. But some screenshots are given, as some experiences leave you with core memories or muscle memory.
I take screenshots by journaling. When something major happens—good or bad—I immortalize it with wet ink and paper. I try, as best I can, to capture how I feel in that moment, too. It’s exhilarating to return to your faded words and witness a dream that has come true. It’s also humbling to watch something that was once a good thing become a not-so-good thing: a failed relationship that set your heart aflutter months or years prior, a job you loved now gone, a once-ornate apartment recently vacated.
Screenshots can remind you of life’s capacity to surprise you and of your capacity to act with incomplete information.
No matter how much uncertainty we face, we still chase certainty, even though, as Maria Popova put it, we are “children of improbability.” Everything we love exists, Popova said, “not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary, but because the universe took a gamble against the staggering odds otherwise.” The universe can embolden us to view uncertainty as a chance to be courageous.
Your mind also takes screenshots.
Albert Bandura, the psychologist who developed the concept of self-efficacy, tried to understand what made some people more confident than others. He used unorthodox, if not excessive, methods, including a sort of snake exposure therapy, and concluded that people become more confident when they gradually do difficult things and discover that they can cope. He used science-speak to get at what some Africans mean when they ask you, after hearing about your awful experience: “But did you die?!”
Every time you do a difficult thing, your brain takes a screenshot and tucks it away like an arrow in a quiver.
This week, my wife’s brain has been taking more screenshots. She released her third book — a children’s book called “Midas the Tickle Monster”— and all week I’ve listened to her complain about how hard the process is, even as she executes it flawlessly. She can handle the stress because her brain has pulled out the screenshots from the last two times she went through this.
I’m carving out a new career path from solid rock. The specks of dust that the picking and chiseling kick into my eyes are screenshots saved. And the calluses on my hands? Click — also saved.
Take a screenshot!
TOGETHER WITH TLDR MARKETING
The brief 330K+ marketers actually read
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THINGS
Meet Midas
I could say my wife wrote a children’s book and you should show up in droves to support her. But instead, all I’ll say is the first time I attended a book launch, I met the love of my life. So…
A quote
We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed…
…We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.
A picture
Remember the party I mentioned last week? This pic is from Part 2 of it.
WORK
SUM of all its parts
You have expense data in a table:
Pay attention to the grand total cell at the bottom and the formula for computing it at the top.
This is what most people do. But what if you want to filter the categories like this:
It would be nice if the grand total would auto-adjust based on the filter.
That’s what SUBTOTAL is for:
See what happens to the grand total when we filter to just look at “Meals.”
The odd part of the SUBTOTAL function is the first argument called “function code.” Different operations (sum, average, product, etc.) are coded by numbers. Here’s the list:
1isAVERAGE2isCOUNT3isCOUNTA4isMAX5isMIN6isPRODUCT7isSTDEV8isSTDEVP9isSUM10isVAR11isVARP
That’s why we start the function with a seemingly random “9”
PRODUCTS
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FUN
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> It’s hard to make a good browser
> Test your values against the average American’s
> Guess where the artifact is from
Have a great weekend,
— SO
