Baby Name PowerPoint Strategy

Sam Parr shares how he and his wife use structured decision-making processes for important life choices, including naming their baby.

"The way we make decisions in our house is one person will present 3 options and then the other person can select the one option they want. For baby names, my wife wanted to select the 3 and then let me select the final one. She made a PowerPoint presentation that explained the three names, their background, and I had parameters like wanting something somewhat traditional, preferably from the Bible because everyone in my family was named from the Bible.

She presented the background of each name, what it means, famous people with that name, where it ranks on the popularity list. In this case, it was neutral presentation, but the key is that if you're the person selecting the 3 options, you should select 3 things that you actually like. That way, when the other person makes the final choice, you're happy no matter what. She did this big presentation on 3 different names, I selected the winner, and that's how we got our baby's name.

Before we got married, we did similar exercises. Six months into dating, we wrote down where we wanted to be in 10 years, how we wanted to raise a family, where we wanted to live. We identified deal breakers - like for her, it was wanting to raise children in the New York area to be around her family. I was fine with that. These types of discussions, where you have the floor to talk things through, are incredibly effective."