Forty names and no sign

A couple in Amman are opening a small shop selling children's books, and they keep a note on a phone with forty possible names on it.

Most of them are fine. Several are good. Three or four are genuinely lovely. Every friend who hears about the shop adds another one, and the list keeps growing.

The shop still has no name.

They say they are waiting for the right idea. They are not. The right idea is almost certainly already on the list. What is missing is the decision, and the nerve to live with it.

Producing options has never been easier. Friends, a search, a few minutes with any of the tools that now offer suggestions on demand, and a page fills with perfectly usable candidates. The supply of decent ideas is close to endless.

Which means the scarce part has moved. It is the act of picking one, and crossing out the other thirty-nine while knowing that some of them were good too. Then it is the slower work of carrying the chosen one out into the street: painting it above the door, saying it to strangers until it sounds like a place, making it mean something to the parents who walk past.

That is where the creativity sits. Not in the list. In the cut, and in the effort that follows it.

When someone says they are stuck because they have nothing good to work with, it is rarely true. They have plenty. What they do not yet have is the courage to choose one and be seen standing behind it.