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#98: You are not special

#98: You are not special

Shem Opolot
November 22, 2024

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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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Happy Friday 🎉 Three things: 1) By the time most of you read this, I’ll have suspended my months-long period of being a deadbeat dad to hold my babies and fight to win their affection at all costs.

2) I’ve had a long year in which I’ve learned lots of new cool work productivity tricks. I’m holding a four-hour workshop on November 30 (with a break and snacks) to turn you into a keyboard warrior. I’m talking Excel, presentations, AI, cool websites you haven’t heard of that you should be using, writing, everything! I'm only taking 10 people and charging Shs. 200,000 (~$55). If you’re interested, reply to this email quickly. First come, first served.

3) I replaced The Friday Fix playlist this week only to share my little brother’s debut album because it’s fire and also because what kind of big brother would I be if I didn’t?

LIFE.
You are not special.

Photo by davisuko on Unsplash

I have two vivid memories of John.

In the first one, he was sitting in class, staring blankly into space with his left index finger in his mouth. He did this all the time. You could tell that finger spent a lot of time in his mouth because it looked different from his other index finger. You could also tell he got slapped for this habit at home because his pulled cheeks mustered a smirk away from his helicopter parents. He wore his sports outfit on a day designated for regular uniform—boundless rebelliousness for a 10-year-old.

My second memory is vaguer: John was buzzing around and weaving through the desks in class and through the hallways during break time. He adorned his school uniform with unsanctioned items of clothing: a scarf, an argyle sweater, or plain calf-length socks that bucked the colorful hems of the uniform socks. Always laughing and always making everyone around him laugh. Out of class. In class. It didn’t matter. John was always the exception. Always special.

I didn’t see John again for decades.

During a conversation with a couple of old friends, I realized something. When you attend some of the best schools in Uganda, get a university degree, and score a decent job, you join a small crop of people in Uganda. In the world, even. For most of you in this group, your parents were one of many siblings, but somehow, they were the lucky ones. The ones that made it out of the village. The ones that escaped poverty. The ones that must rush to the aid of the village idiot when they fall in a ditch in a drunken stupor. Your parents were the special ones.

And speaking of special, do you know why you’re better at giving advice than taking it?

Do you know why you don’t extend as much grace to others as you give to yourself? When someone is late, they have bad manners, but when you’re late, you have a long list of reasons to justify it. The entire universe—except you, who hopped in the shower last minute—conspired to make you late.

Decades later, I ran into John, and he was still special. All his best qualities persisted: his zeal for life, his jokes, his charm, his joy, his laughter, and his capacity to color outside the lines without consequences.

And the ladies loved John—an indisputable fact that left some of us late bloomers with mangoes in our throats.

But as special as John was, that charm eventually did him harm.

He contracted HIV.

He couldn’t believe he, of all people, had contracted HIV.

He was reckless, juggled multiple partners, and often didn’t use protection because he, of all people, couldn’t get infected.

So when he got the news, he curled up in a corner in a dark room and denied it for a while. He sought second opinions, drank heavily, and put off starting antiretroviral treatment until it was too late.

In a lot of ways, you are special. But you can benefit from decentering yourself a lot more. You can benefit from taking your own advice and taking the appropriate precautions you’d recommend to anyone else.

Don’t assume you’re special. Because, overall, you aren’t.

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THINGS.
A quote

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like — then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.

Jean Cocteau

A tweet.

Federer’s message after Rafael Nadal announced his retirement from pro tennis is beautiful.

Vamos, @RafaelNadal!

As you get ready to graduate from tennis, I’ve got a few things to share before I maybe get emotional.

Let’s start with the obvious: you beat me—a lot. More than I managed to beat you. You challenged me in ways no one else could. On clay, it felt like I… x.com/i/web/status/1…
— Roger Federer (@rogerfederer)
7:27 AM • Nov 19, 2024

A picture.

Look at how glorious Union Station in D.C. looked last week 😍.

Source: My friend

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WORK.
Take it or leave it.

I bet you haven’t heard of this function in Excel.

So…your business is booming, the tax man isn’t hounding you, and you have some data:

You want to create a dynamic table that shows you the top 3 selling products, so you use…drumroll, please 🥁… the TAKE function.

The TAKE function, well, takes, any range of data (or array if ya fancy) and returns the specific number of rows (or columns) you want.

=TAKE(array, rows)

In our case, we’ll nest the SORT function inside the TAKE function to sort the data the way we want it, and then return our desired number of rows:

=TAKE(SORT(array,sort_index,[sort_order]),rows)

array — the range we want (our sales info)

sort_index — the index number of the column we want to sort by, derived by counting the columns from left to right, starting from 1 (The Product column is 1; the Sales volume column is 2)

sort_order — 1 for ascending order and -1 for descending order

rows — the number of rows we want to return. If we want our top 3 products, rows will equal 3. Top 4 = 4.

The TAKE function scans the data, uses the SORT function to sort the range based on the values in the Sales volume column, and returns our top three selling products.