Room a Thousand Years Wide
30 January 2023
I spent a good part of the day working on my résumé (sorry for the rhyme; should I add it as an endorsable skill on LinkedIn?). As I tried to cobble together the metrics and stats that would make me a more attractive candidate for a future employer, I realized a couple of things. The first is that gathering that information after the sudden and unexpected revocation of access to all of your previous role’s accomplishments is incredibly difficult. And, second, this process reminded me of an off-handed thought I added to a proposed talk about labels and naming that I pitched to a conference last year. With your indulgence, I’d like to dig a little deeper into it tonight.
For some background, the talk I initially came up with was about how important naming can be when thinking about how people will interact with your product or feature. It’s more than just a branding exercise, especially if you’re going to need them to use a search function to get anything meaningful out of it, or even find it in the first place. The inspiration for the talk came after I read Lulu Miller’s book, Why Fish Don’t Exist. There’s a lot more going on in it than just the classification of species, but I was intrigued by the idea that every item in our known universe has a name because someone thought to attach one to it. And these names came from — and with — all that makes humans…
