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- #85: Don't move in silence
#85: Don't move in silence
Shem Opolot
August 23, 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 🎉 As an adult, you reflect on how your parents raised you and think you’ll be better. You think you’ll right all their wrongs, and your kids will somersault on the straight and narrow all their lives. Instead, you get an almost three-year-old boy who has learned how to read faces but not rooms, and when he PISSES YOU OFF, he stares at you and says, “Is daddy sad?” “It’s okay to be sad, daddy.”
LIFE.
Don’t move in silence.
Mine is a comment, not a question.
Okay, not really. I just have a conference next week, so I’m practicing.
We talked about how to be lucky, but some of you missed that meeting, so life has clicked its heels together, snapped its fingers, and offered you some luck.
Next week, two miracles will happen in my life:
#1. By force or by fire:
After two consecutive rejections from Harvard because, I imagine, they hit their quota of balding black men; and abandoning my application to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine because of their disdain for generalists, one of my other options—GW (don’t tell them they weren’t my first)—slid into my DMs, offering me admission, salvation, and a small scholarship just enough to buy me chewing gum, a laptop, and a plane ticket to D.C.
I didn’t have the money to pay my way.
So, I boarded the LinkedIn cringe train and passed out circulars, hoping to tug at someone’s heartstrings or purse strings.
After my graduation in 2026 (speaking it into existence), I’ll tell you how I found the money to attend GW. It has been imperfect, stressful, nerve-wracking, and hilarious, but for now, by some miracle, the second year of my doctorate starts next week.
#2. I don’t believe in moving in silence:
Because no matter how much scorn or second-hand embarrassment it attracts, putting yourself out there is always worth it.
As a generalist doctorate student in Washington D.C., two questions really scatter cookie crumbs all over my bedsheets: “What do you do?” and “How’s the dissertation going?”
What does the guy who has a thousand interests study for his dissertation?
Well, it has been a struggle.
But eventually, I combined my interests and qualities into a project that would excite me, boost my career, and marry my passion for data and storytelling.
Enter—Health Information Exchange in Africa.
The COVID-19 pandemic showed us that you can cough in Kampala, and someone in Las Vegas catches a cold, so I want to study how countries can share information quickly and safely to prevent us from hoarding toilet paper and listening to “Don’t rush, slow touch…” on repeat until our ears bleed.
This interest led me to Africa CDC, so I boarded the cringe train again.
Several DMs and three or four degrees of separation later, one of the contacts introduced me to Peter, the guy at Africa CDC whose job it is to grapple with the questions I asked.
He answered our first call at a funeral, so you know he was down for the cause.
Buried in the couch creases of our lengthy conversation, Peter mentioned a conference in late August that he thought I should attend. He said he’d check his budget, but it seemed like one of those things people just say. Like when you stumble into an old friend and say you should catch up soon, yet you know you’ll make no effort to see them.
So, I tried not to get my hopes up.
Two weeks ago, after finishing my summer classes, that darn dissertation ding chimed, so I drafted an email to force the Shem-shaped bubble at the bottom of Peter’s saucepan to the surface.
He responded on WhatsApp, so you know he was down for the cause.
Yesterday, his assistant sent me the itinerary for my trip to Accra, Ghana, for the conference. All expenses paid.
If you want to be lucky, don’t move in silence.
THINGS.
A quote
If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.
A picture.
My knees couldn’t fit in the car, yet we were supposed to share the same seatbelt. I flouted all the rules for a photo op, and I regret nothing.
WORK.
Turn your life table around.
You have data in a table:
To rearrange it to get a different view, you use the TRANSPOSE function.
=TRANSPOSE(range)
Done. You can beautify the table if you like.
This document will help you start your journey to being above average with Excel.
FUN.
The Friday Fix Playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ Test your animal knowledge with this guessing game
✅ A collection of great print ads.
✅ Why climb Mt. Everest when you can scale it digitally?
✅ If you got it like that: the right way to put dishes in your dishwasher.
✅ How they calculate the calories in your food.
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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