This week in The Legibility Letter
● The name that couldn’t be withdrawn: 1507, Waldseemüller named America — six years later he tried to take the name back, Spain refused to accept it for two centuries, and it’s still America (a name belongs to whoever repeats it, not whoever chose it)
● From the inside: our lives rest quietly on invisible loops — rituals that correct drift without our seeing them, and whose value we only discover once we remove them and something starts to slip
● A quote we like: Rita Mae Brown had it right — good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement (mistakes aren’t the price of learning, they’re the learning, paid for up front)
The name that couldn’t be withdrawn
In 1513 a German cartographer published a map of the world and, across the new continent, wrote “Terra Incognita”: unknown land.
Six years earlier, on the same continent, he himself had written a different word. “America”.
A thousand copies
His name was Martin Waldseemüller. In 1507, with his colleague Matthias Ringmann, he printed a map of the world and named the new land after Amerigo Vespucci, the navigator whose accounts they had read. A thousand copies of that map were printed.
Then he had second thoughts, because Columbus had got there first. On his 1513 map he replaced the name with “Terra Incognita” and added a note about Columbus.
It was too late. Other cartographers had copied the word, and in 1538 Gerardus Mercator wrote it across both continents, north and south. Spain refused to accept the name for two centuries, because the credit belonged to Columbus.
It made no difference.
Of those thousand copies, one survives. The US Library of Congress paid ten million dollars for it.
A name belongs to whoever repeats it, not whoever chose it.
The name you already have
The same thing happens to your business, on a different scale.
Picture an accountancy firm whose website describes it as “end-to-end business management for SMEs”. When its clients recommend it, they say something else: “They’re the ones who get back to you the same day.”
That’s the phrase that travels. The next client hears it before they ever visit the website, and it’s what they look for when they arrive. If they don’t find it, they feel they’ve come to the wrong firm.
Your clients’ phrase is almost never the one you’d have chosen. It tends to be smaller, more concrete and less elegant. That’s why they remember it.
The trap
Be careful about accepting any name you’re given. If your clients call you “the website people” and you want to sell them strategy, that name will follow you into every proposal.
But you can’t fix it by taking it off your website either. Waldseemüller took it off his map and Spain rejected it for two hundred years. The name kept circulating, because other people were carrying it.
The only thing that changes a name is giving people something else to repeat: a concrete result, put the way a client would put it.
This week, ask five clients how they’d explain what you do to a friend. Write down their exact words, without tidying them up. If three of them say the same thing and it isn’t in the first line of your website, put it there.
Your name already exists. Your clients say it when you’re not in the room.
Invisible loops
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of balancing loops. They come from systems thinking, and the logic is simple.
A thermostat is the classic example. When the room cools, the heating comes on; when it warms up, it goes off. Nobody is watching the temperature, yet it stays steady, because the loop keeps correcting any drift.
Our lives are quietly built on loops like that, and we almost never see them as loops. We see them as habits, rituals or obligations. We only discover what they were holding up when we remove them and something starts to slip.
I remember one of my first relationships. We had a ritual of watching TV together at the end of the day to switch off from work. It seemed small, almost trivial. At some point we stopped. Years later I understood that the ritual was a signal of connection, a small loop that brought us back to each other every evening. Without it, the connection faded and neither of us noticed. There were other reasons the relationship didn’t work, of course. But that loop played its part.
I’ve seen it in training too. For a while I stopped hard rolling in BJJ because the business was eating all my time, and my cardio collapsed. Those sessions were the pulse that told me where my endurance was, and they forced me to keep it up. When I took them away, I lost both the gauge and what the gauge was holding up.
It’s why I still work with clients. I don’t need to financially. I do it because it keeps me in touch with reality. It’s a loop that corrects me constantly: it shows me what works, what’s changed in the market and which of my ideas are no longer true. If I dropped it, my thinking would start drifting away from reality without my noticing.
Once you look, it’s everywhere. The weekly call with your mother that keeps the relationship alive. Reading your clients’ emails, not just the reports. Checking your numbers every month, even when they’re going well. The Sunday walk with a friend. None of them seems important on its own. All of them are quietly correcting something.
The danger of an invisible loop is that its absence is invisible too. Nothing breaks all at once. Everything drifts a little at a time, until one day the cardio has gone, the connection has gone, or your view of the market belongs to a market that no longer exists.
Before you drop a habit, ask what it was holding up.
Edward
“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
— Rita Mae Brown
I love this quote because it describes the awkward circle every entrepreneur goes through: to decide well, you first have to decide badly.
We want good judgement from the start. To make the right calls, avoid the mistakes and skip the painful part. But judgement isn’t something you study. You build it up.
And you build it up, above all, by getting things wrong. Every bad decision leaves behind something no book can give you: the physical memory of how it felt when it went wrong.
That’s why the entrepreneur with a good eye isn’t the one who never failed. It’s the one who failed often enough to recognise the pattern before repeating it.
My judgement today is built almost entirely on decisions that went wrong. The wrong hires taught me how to hire. The clients I shouldn’t have taken on taught me how to say no. None of that came from getting it right first time.
So mistakes aren’t the price of learning. They’re the learning itself, paid for up front.
Good judgement has a price. And you always pay it in the bad judgement that came before.