The Possible Influence of Names an a Person’s Destiny

Does your name mean something special? Is it a name that was carried down from generations ago from relatives you haven’t met before? Does it have a sacred meaning? Or is it just a name your parents searched up on a Google name randomizer? All our name really is, is a sound. A vibration that we can process and know that the name belongs to you. We grow up responding to the name, we spend time writing a number of letters in an order down on paper.

Does a person’s name influence the person they become? When I asked two different people from different generations about if your name could mean something important to you, I got similar results. They both said that they do believe that a name can influence their destiny. They also said that if you are surrounded by a certain group of people, such as being around a certain race, or having a very common name for a race you belong to, people could start to stereotype your name.

Neeta Singhal, from Linkedin, acknowledges that names do have a deeper meaning than we think. Our names can have a certain ‘vibe’ to it. She said that if you have a positive name, ‘Such as Rose, meaning somebody who is beautiful and fragrant; Angelin, means somebody who is like an angel and has positive vibration of guiding spirit’. If you have a happy, positive meaning name, that you will turn out as a very happy, positive person, with a positive mindset, and vice versa. The second source, by Maria Konnikova from The New Yorker, said that in 1948, a study was conducted, it had 300 men who graduated, they took the ‘regular’ names, like John, and looked at their grades, then they took the ‘irregular’ names, such as names you might find in other countries to be common, and in different races and looked at their grades. The study showed that the ‘regular names’, had better test scores, less of a flunking rate then the ‘irregular names’. The study was conducted multiple times decades after the first one, and got similar results. Konnikova argues that your name can effect just about everything, from your job, to the people you marry.

I say that it could be very possible to have your name influence who you become. I think that it all depends on how you live your life. If you grew up surrounded by certain types of people, especially with a name from a race, religion, etc. Then that specific environment will rub off onto you. For example, even here at West Linn High School, you can see very different people roaming the halls, you can see the people who are caught up in sports, they want to surround themselves with sports and flashing televisions that scream various sports vocabulary, then you see people who want to be stuck up with their face in a screen for hours on end then hang out with people in real life, those are the gamers. I think that your name can ‘set your path’ from the moment you are born, to the last breath you take.

Names follow us everywhere we go. They give a person an idea of who we are. A sample of you. Your personality. Names make up a big part of who you are, they can almost speak for who we are. Names shouldn’t be casted aside, as if they mean nothing, when they can speak for you, Does a person’s name influence the person they become? I like to think so.