Name It, Then Be Willing to Rename It

The Founder's Path · Letter Two

The studio took three names before it found the right one. For a long time I read that as evidence of indecision — proof I hadn't known what I was doing. I don't read it that way anymore. Each rename wasn't a failure. It was the idea getting sharper, and the name catching up to it. A pivot, I've come to think, is clarity arriving late — not a mistake arriving early.

Naming a thing forces you to decide what it actually is. You cannot name what you cannot describe, so the act of choosing a name drags the fuzzy idea into focus and makes you commit to a shape. That is why I name things early, even when I'm unsure: the name is a tool for thinking, a way of finding out what I believe by trying to say it in a single word. And then, often, the name turns out to be wrong — not because I failed, but because I understand the thing better now than I did when I named it.

Name it to think clearly. Rename it when you've thought more clearly still.

Each time the studio changed names, the new one didn't erase the old work; it described it more truly. The rename was just the visible mark of an idea that had quietly gotten sharper underneath. I've stopped reading those moments as false starts. They were the same understanding I would have chosen from the beginning, if I'd only had it then.

Telling a pivot from restlessness

The honest worry is that “a pivot is clarity arriving late” becomes an excuse to keep changing the name forever and never ship a thing. So I hold the two apart by their direction. A real rename comes from the work — I have learned something by building it, and the old name no longer fits what I now know it to be. Restlessness comes from avoiding the work — the renaming is a way to feel like progress without facing the hard, unglamorous middle. One follows understanding; the other substitutes for it. If the new name is downstream of something I genuinely learned, I trust it. If it's just novelty, it's procrastination wearing clarity's clothes.

The mistake almost everyone makes first

Treating the first name as a vow. Once it's on the door, the logo, the deck, changing it feels like admitting in public that you were wrong — so people defend a name that no longer describes the thing, and the mismatch quietly confuses everyone, themselves included. Holding a name too tightly costs more than the rename ever would. The opposite mistake is just as real: treating no name as sacred and changing it on every mood, which trains everyone around you to stop believing any of them. Commit fully, hold loosely — name it like you mean it, and rename it when the work earns it.

Before you go

Take something you're working on and write the one-line description you'd give it today — the truest version you can manage. Now look at its name. If the name and the honest description have drifted apart, that gap is not a problem to hide. It's your understanding telling you it has moved on ahead of the label. The rename is only ever the name catching up to what you already know.

— Edward

Written from my own practice building Morvion and Nornic — and the journal entry this course keeps returning to, Letting the Work Go.