Make your own name
On Hollywood habits, Poor Richard, and what it takes to succeed without the family name
In pursuit of her cinematic career, Malia Obama did something unusual: She omitted her famous last name from the credits of a film. It isn't as though people couldn't have worked out her connection to the project, but the names cited in credits have always mattered a great deal.
■ Benjamin Franklin once advised, "'Tis a shame that your family is an honor to you! You ought to be an honor to your family." The language may seem quaint, but the sentiment is as fresh as ever.
■ We don't count on family names quite as much as our ancestors probably did: In the days before credit ratings, for instance, your parents' creditworthiness with the local store probably stood in quite a lot for your own. Today, we have Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.
■ Notwithstanding that modernization, it should still be each person's individual goal to leave their family name better than it was bestowed on them. "Better" doesn't have to mean "more famous" or "more accomplished". It really only has to mean that a person put more into the world than they took out.
■ Being the young child of a President has taxed more than a few of the people who have grown up inside the White House, so it wouldn't have been a travesty for Malia Obama to have used her birth name in the movie credits; she could make a defensible case that what she lost in privacy and family time was owed back to her with a gentle head start toward notoriety. But it's more honorable that she avoided the recognition.
