Justin comes from the Latin Justinus. From Justus. It means just. Righteous. Upright.
I did not know that until I was an adult. Most people do not know what their name means. They carry it around for decades like a bag they have never opened.
When I found out, something settled in me. Not because I thought I had been living it perfectly. But because it felt like a clue I had been given at the beginning and only just found.
Names are not neutral.
A name is not just a sound other people use to get your attention. It is the first thing your parents decided about you before they knew anything about you. It is the word that appears in every email, every introduction, every handshake for the rest of your life.
It precedes you. It outlasts you.
Most people treat it like a label. I started treating it like a standard.
What just actually means.
Not justice in the legal sense. Not fairness in the abstract sense that people use when they want something and frame it as a principle.
Just means you say what you mean. You do what you said. You do not calibrate your position based on who is in the room. You are the same person at the table when things are going well as you are when they are not.
That is not easy. It is not supposed to be easy. That is the point.
I have been in rooms where the right move — the profitable move, the strategic move — was to say something I did not believe, or stay quiet about something I knew was wrong. I have not always gotten it right. But I have always known what right looked like. I knew what the name required.
The weight of it.
There is something both clarifying and uncomfortable about having a name that means something moral.
It means you cannot claim ignorance about what you are supposed to be aiming at. It is written into the word people call you every day.
I think that is actually useful. Most of us spend years trying to figure out who we are and what we stand for. The name was always a hint. Not a cage. Not a verdict. A direction.
And the older I get, the more I think that is enough. You do not need a ten page manifesto about your values. You need a direction. You point yourself at it and you keep walking.
Strange is the other half.
Strange is not Latin. It comes from the Old French estrange, from the Latin extraneus. It means foreign. From outside. Outside of the ordinary.
So the full name is: just, and foreign to ordinary.
I did not choose any of that. But I have never tried to escape it either.
When I was younger, Strange felt like a burden. The name that got laughed at. The name that required a second look. The name that did not sound like a doctor or a banker or anything you were supposed to grow up to be.
Now it sounds exactly right.
The businesses I have built did not start from a playbook. They started from problems I could not stop noticing and a refusal to wait for someone else to solve them. That is what happens when you are slightly foreign to ordinary. You see things that people inside the ordinary cannot see. You build things they would not think to build.
What I would tell a kid with my name.
Look it up. Know what it means. Not so you feel pressure to be perfect but so you understand what is already written into who you are.
Your name is not just what people call you. It is a signal about what you came from and a nudge toward what you are supposed to become. Whether you pay attention to that nudge or not is up to you.
I have been paying attention for a long time now.
Just. Upright. Foreign to ordinary.
Worse things to build a life around.