“A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
Dale Carnegie
It’s late on Sunday and I am looking forward to going to sleep and starting off the week on the right foot. I spent all day outside in the city, watching Anne and other friends crush it in the New York City marathon. The way a beautiful fall day is meant to be spent.
I’d been a spectator in years past, but I’d never fully surrendered myself to cheering until this year. I would stand at the railing, clapping politely while I waited for someone I knew to come by. Then I’d yell like crazy for a few seconds, wave as they passed, and resume my clapping.
One of the beautiful things about major marathons is that people write their names in big, black sharpie on their chest. Others have custom made shirts or bold, shiny lettering that tells you who they are. No matter how they do it, about one in five runners, for the brief moment when they run past you, are no longer strangers. They’re Sherry from Brooklyn.
This wasn’t the first year that I noticed the names. But it was the first year I started using them. Every name I saw, I yelled out. The friends I was with did the same. “LET’S GO CARRIE! YOU’RE MAKING THIS LOOK EASY! YOU GOT THIS MARIANA!” Over and over, we shouted ourselves hoarse at people we’d never seen before.
That’s just the spirit of a marathon like this one. There were over 30,000 runners, and each of them is out there for something. A personal best. To support a friend’s first race. To keep alive a multiyear streak. To guide a disabled athlete. No one is just phoning it in.
And when you connect with those runners by name, they notice. I made more eye contact with strangers, saw more fist pumps and let out more whoops than I have in years. Some picked up the pace ever-so-slightly; others seemed to fill up with energy from the sound of their name close by. A few brave souls came over for high fives.
Each one of them felt seen. And sometimes, particularly when you’re doing something challenging, it can feel really good to be seen. Cheering is great, sure, but cheering is for everyone. Shouting someone’s name is just for them.
One of the biggest sources of anxiety for many people returning to the office after a year and a half is forgetting their coworkers’ names. I’ve got this terrible fear of introducing myself to someone I already know and having to chuckle and say “COVID, am I right?” Or, even worse, of missing that window altogether and not having an excuse when I don’t know someone six months from now.
An easy fix to this would be to use name tags. We’re so used to the digital version, sitting beneath our image on video calls, that we could easily transition to sticker and sharpie without much trouble. We could treat work like a high school reunion, where we acknowledge no one remembers every single person, and start fresh. Everybody knows everybody.
I doubt this will happen. Adults are too serious for sticker name tags. That guy with his badge clipped to his pants is bad enough. But how great would it be? After all of the name-sparked joy from today, I think there’s a strong case to be made for doing silly things to learn people’s names.
Yes, I can – and will – introduce myself to people the old fashioned way. But I’d like to go one step further. When I interview candidates for our summer internship, the first thing I do is greet them by the name on their resume. “Great to meet you Hannah.” It’s staring right at me, and saying it out loud creates an instant connection. What if we did that elsewhere? When I run into someone at the coffee machine, I’d like to know their name ahead of time. “Morning, Mark.” Think of the delight!
There’s been a lot of talk about the ways in which the pandemic changed things for all of us. How it led us to refocus our time and energy on the things that matter. Something that gets less attention are the opportunities that this post-pandemic stage gives us to do things differently. These are things we learned during the pandemic, they’re things we haven’t thought much about since and don’t feel great about the way things were.
Let 2022 be the year of name calling.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
In Praise of My Favorite Running Shirt – Running Probably
“After a few months of training, I started to notice that some of my clothes were getting a little loose and baggy. Feeling bold, I pulled out that long sleeved shirt and went running. The fit wasn’t perfect, but it was tolerable, and I liked how it made me feel fast.”
Southbound – Rod Farvard
“Ultimately, failure is what leads to growth. I think back and there were many times I was hurting incomprehensibly, but none of that matters — because I did the thing.”
What I’m Listening To:
Philip Krim On Building Casper Into a Leading Brand – Elevate Podcast
Matt Mullenwheg – The Tim Ferriss Podcast
“So we just started to say: well, just like it’s silly to discriminate on the basis of let’s just say gender. Right, if we said we’re not going to hire men or women. It’s dumb because you just cut out half of the possible hiring pool. So by definition, people you hire will be not as good as if you looked at 100 percent. We said we’re going to look at the 99.9 percent of the world that doesn’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area.”