I’ve decommitted from committed

If you’ve followed my emails for awhile, you may recall me talking about naming my business Committed Media. It’s got a good back story. I was inspired to do it while at the Wyndham Garden Maximum Security Facility in Hanoi, Vietnam this past January. My wife Sana and I had just finished putting together the application for her to get a permanent resident visa for the U.S. and I had just flown over there to be with my wife – in hopes we would come to the U.S. together but that was ultimately not meant to be.

I was thinking about the extraordinary commitment it took both of us to get to this point. No shortage of adversity given everything that had gone down our first year of marriage. There was (and still is) nothing haphazard about our relationship. Very intentional, very purposeful.

So I thought I should name our media production business that, in honor of what we’d gone through and were about to go through.

But there was one problem that kept nagging at me as the months went by after naming it, going public with it, etc.

And that is it’s just plain boring. Cliche. Perhaps a bit high-minded.

One would be forgiven for assuming the person who came up with such a name perhaps thinks just a little bit too much of himself.

So the rationalization hamster was spinning and spinning. I justified it by telling myself, “But it’s got a good story behind it” and so forth. But I just couldn’t shake that thought of it’s just plain dull, especially in the minds of our market, which is predominantly American.

Americans are suckers for foreign, romantic sounding stuff. Like the strip mall that’s named “Shoppes at Squid Creek” or whatever – and then has a Jimmy John’s, a barber shop and a Kroger. So much for foreign delicacies, right? But it’s effective because it’s what people want, and find endearing.

So I was explaining this to Sana a couple of weeks ago. Sana’s the kind of person who will say, “Whatever you want to do, honey, I’ll support you in it.” Which is a lesson saved for another email, but that’s just the way she is. And that’s what she said during our conversation, but I could tell she wasn’t thrilled with the name of the business either.

So we began brainstorming ideas. “What word would best describe you and me?” I asked. Or maybe she asked me, I don’t remember exactly.

I said the word, “Conscientious.”

“That’s the exact word I was just about to say, you read my mind!” she said.

So you don’t ignore that, but what do you do from there? You don’t name it “Conscientious Media”; that’s worse than where we began.

So taking a cue from “The Shoppes at Squid Creek”, located on the corner of Stewart and Smith, I looked up the word “conscientious” in Persian, Sana’s native language. In Persian it looks like this: با وجدان

Transliterated into English, it’s “Ba Vojdaan.”

So it was an immediate frontrunner, and after entertaining a few more ideas, we decided to just go with it.

So that’s the name of our business, and we’ve even renamed our little podcast by that name too. There will be more to come on it in the next few weeks, but in the meantime, you can subscribe to our podcast and keep up to date with us at this link: https://flowjn.com/jns

Be well,

James and Sana

P.S. If you click the link, you’ll notice we’ve changed podcast hosting platforms from Captivate to Acast. There’s an interesting, “teachable moment” story in that too, and I’ll share it soon.