Naming “Inventing Elephants”

The best article on how to name your blog is Darren Rowse’s Choosing the Domain Name for Your Blog.  For myself, I began with a goal of finding a name easy to say and to remember.  As I brainstormed I was influenced by scarcity, the idea of “concrete”, and generous use of a thesaurus before I chose Inventing Elephants.  This post rambles through the iterations of my thought process.

My first idea was thinkbetter. 

That was what my goal boiled down to, after all.  But it was already taken.  For a while I thought of seekingsynthesis, referring to the idea of bringing more than one idea together and coming up with something new.  The alliteration was pretty neat too.  But then I read up on the philosophical concept of synthesis and the name didn’t seem to fit well enough, in addition to looking complicated.

I played with all sorts of word combinations about improving thinking.  I mined the thesaurus and used a couple online tools.  But nothing impressed me.  The closest I got was seekingthinking, but that was disturbingly hard to say.

Concrete.  Concrete.  Concrete.

The word just kept popping its head up, based on a recent reading of Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, and none of my previous ideas met that criteria.  I turned my thoughts towards that direction and with a little mental ”click” I remembered the metaphor that I had used a couple years ago in trying to write an artists’ statement a couple years ago. I saw the fable of the blind men in the elephant in a different way and how well it could fit into what I wanted to say. 

I could call my blog seeingelephants!

When I searched for the phrase and its variations I found some interesting, but not unpleasant, connotations related to traveling long distances and having an unusual experience.  I also found a blog with a similar name, and some claimed domain names.

I decided to see if I could vary the concept to include a little more originality.

I considered taking concrete a step farther with a name such as fiveelephants of justoneelephant, but they seemed so blah.  I wanted something that conveyed a sense of process and action. 

So I pulled out the thesaurus again and started running through verbs, jotting down a substantial list.  I discarded some intriguing options that almost made it such as visualizing, envisioning, engineering, and imagining because they didn’t quite fit.  Inventing seemed to have that aspect of making up something original, but implied taking the concepts a step beyond into reality in a way that imagining did not.

I waited a couple days to let the idea of inventingelephants bounce around in my subconscious until I was sure I wouldn’t find an objection to it.  Then I bought the domain name and directed it here.

Inventing Elephants it is!

I would have lost out if my earlier ideas had been available and I had stopped pushing the creative process.  How many times do any of us do that?  What else might I have missed doing better because I didn’t take one or two steps further when they didn’t seem necessary at the time?