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- #60: Your culture sucks
#60: Your culture sucks
Shem Opolot
February 23, 2024
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.
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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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I’ll occasionally make you laugh
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Happy Friday 🎉 Welcome to the 60th issue of The Friday Fix! Can you believe we’re still doing this? Even when my hands fail me, I’ll dictate as my assistant types.
Before I had a two-year-old, I considered myself a patient person. Not anymore. Remember that one time I celebrated Zion using the potty? Yeah, that was a false alarm. We’re in the trenches here, so if you have a hack I can’t find on Google or TikTok, please message me. All our lives depend on it.
Side note: I seem to be the last person to discover Billie Eilish, so The Friday Fix playlist is a little emo this time round.
LIFE.
Your culture sucks.
It’s our turn to change the world, and it’s no fun.
The night before my wedding, I attended an impromptu party because my best man noticed I had a major case of the shakes and figured an outing would help.
It did.
The weeks leading up to the wedding were full of impromptu bashes with send-off messages that half-sounded like I was going to war.
Meanwhile…for my wife, there were also bashes, but more-so…there was guidance from the matriarchs in her life. The advice ran the gamut from centering God in marriage to financial discipline to my personal favorite—“How to keep a man,” as if in marriage, men are caged bulls in an arena, polishing their hooves in the dirt, preparing to charge at a matador.
I got some advice from married men, too; most of which left me wondering why they were still married to those wives they seemed to hate so much.
But this isn’t about marriage. This is about culture.
I was chatting with my wife and Allan (remember him? My serendipitous host in Nairobi? Yeah, he’s great) the other day, and we talked about Africans’ inability to build generational wealth for many reasons, not least of which being our inclination to create wealth in silos. We talked about the fact that Africans are united abroad behind the struggle. But at home, the struggle doesn’t cut across social classes.
We concluded that we must hold our cultures and traditions to the fire and keep whatever doesn’t flicker away as a fleeting ember.
You see, the beauty about culture is it is transient; capable of changing with new information. But the ugly thing about creating new cultures is realizing you’re the generation that must start the change.
And you probably won’t live to see the new world you help build.
I want to create a future where little Zi and Nsemere feel adequately prepared for the price of curtains, potty training a two-year-old (seriously, help us), and the unreliability of tailors and carpenters.
THINGS.
A quote
Take this one to the bank.
…the best idea is rarely the new, shiny one. It's actually the best idea that won't go away.
A picture
I love a good ad. On a train, no less.
WORK.
Search like Velma 🔎
You have a table, and you want to search for specific items and highlight them. It’s a little complicated for a beginner but useful. Follow closely.
Here’s your data:
You want to highlight rows with specific titles, say, “Widget” or “Widget Pro,” etc.
1. Let’s add our search box on the side
Just skip a column to the right of the data, type “search,” and fill the adjacent cell with a color of your choice (I went with grey because I’m boring).
You will use Conditional Formatting to highlight the rows where your search query appears.
2. Select the data range (it must be selected throughout this process), click Format ➡️ Conditional formatting in the toolbar
This is the tricky part. Stay with me. In the Conditional format rules window on the right, you’ll use the SEARCH function to search for whatever you want in the Title column.
3. Under Conditional format rules, go to Format rules, and select Custom formula is from the dropdown
You’ll enter your formula that uses the SEARCH function in the Value or formula box.
The SEARCH function searches for a piece of text (called “a string” by pros, and now, you 😉) within a larger text and returns the numerical position of the piece of text. For example, searching for “def” in “abcdef” returns “4” because “d” is the fourth character in “abcdef.” =SEARCH(find_text, within_text)
If the string you’re searching for exists, Excel returns a number greater than or equal to 1, but if it doesn’t, Excel returns a #VALUE! error. Try it.
Almost there.
4. In the Value or formula box, type this formula:
=SEARCH($I$8,$E8) >= 1
$I$8 is the cell where you’ll type your search query. Mine was cell I8. The double dollar signs tell Excel to only refer to that cell.
$E8 is the first entry in the [Title] column you want to search for your query. You’ll search column “E” for your query. The single dollar sign tells Excel to only search column “E.”
>= is used because SEARCH returns a number greater than or equal to 1 if it finds your query.
Now you can search for whatever Title you want and watch the eligible rows get highlighted.
If you want to learn how to use Excel, this is a good place to start.
FUN.
The Friday Fix Playlist
Brain teaser
From Braingle.
Mark out letters, leaving a six-letter word. You can not scramble the letters around.
A Y B Z X A N H M A I L K N W Y P O A
Hint: You must mark out 13 letters
Answer below
Shem’s picks
✔️ 10 animals with supernatural abilities
✔️ What it means to care about craftsmanship and quality
✔️ If one step forward and two steps backward were a shoe
Brain teaser answer
Answer: A Y B Z X A N H M A I L K N W Y P O A = BANANA
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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