What's in a Name
In 2001, my father sent me a letter about photography.
He was emailing lectures from Sofia to two sons in the Israeli army — weekly, because what else do you do when your children are in the desert and you want them to keep thinking. The series was called Poznanie. Knowledge.
Receiving them was strange and reassuring. Over the hill there was a normal world — a parallel world of normalcy beyond the guns. My father was proof of it, arriving in my inbox every week from Bulgaria with something to learn.
Lecture 24 was about photography. Somewhere in the middle, he wrote this:
“As one clever Jew named Günther Anders writes — his real name was Günther Stern, but it seemed too trivial to him, and he invented the pseudonym Anders, which in German means: other. Different.”
I was 22. I filed this away.
A few years later I was in Amsterdam with nothing — no papers, no legal right to work, a backpack, and a brother. Bulgaria had not yet joined the EU. We could be there. We just couldn’t work.
By November we had run out of money. Down to three hundred euros. Then by chance, some colleagues at a restaurant wanted to go home for Christmas and the place needed replacements. My brother was hired for service. I was hired for the kitchen.
It was meant to be short. It wasn’t. That’s how six years in professional kitchens started — with three hundred euros and someone else’s holiday plans.
A man at the KVK — the Dutch Chamber of Commerce — said: You want to pay taxes. Wonderful. Create a company.
So we needed a name.
My brother and I always made decisions the same way — walking and talking. I’m sure that’s how we came to this one. We walked, and one of us said it.
Our family name is Stern. I remembered my father’s letter. I remembered the philosopher who looked at that exact name and said: not this one.
We called it AndersStar.
Anders — from Günther Anders, the philosopher my father introduced in the desert.
Star — from Stern, the name Günther had left behind.
We stitched together what he had split.
The company let us stay in the Netherlands legally. It closed years later when we both moved into corporate life. But the name had done what names do when you choose them carefully — it carried something forward.
My name is Sterngold now. That’s a story too.
My grandmother on my father’s side — her name was Sterngold. It was lost for a generation. My brother and I discovered it by chance when we were kids, the way children stumble on family secrets they don’t yet know what to do with. We filed it away.
Years later, my mother — who is not even Jewish — moved to Israel, and we followed. In Israel you can change your name easily. So we chose it. Sterngold. Our grandmother’s name, recovered.
Günther Stern became Anders.
I became Sterngold.
AndersStar became WerkAnders.
Here is the part I didn’t know when I chose the name.
Back then, I loved Anders for the name — how he came to change it, what it meant to choose different. I didn’t know the philosopher. I didn’t know the Promethean Gap, or The Obsolescence of Man, or the idea that humans reshape themselves to match their machines. I took the name and walked away.
Twenty years later, I found the philosophy. The same person who gave me a company name in 2004 gave me a coaching framework in 2025. Two gifts, decades apart, from a man who died before I was born.
My father wrote that letter in 2001. I am still running on it.
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