You can probably guess why the number 21 figures into the name of our company. You’d probably guess wrong.
You might guess that it’s because 21 days is the scientifically-proven minimum number of days it takes to change a habit or adopt a new behavior. And we would say to you, you are a hundred percent correct, it IS the scientifically-proven minimum number of days it takes to change a habit or adopt a new behavior, and that is a key to our value proposition, but that’s not why we named our company 21 Day Story.
You might guess we chose 21 because it’s a great mnemonic. It’s the legal drinking age. It’s blackjack. It’s the number of solar rays in the flag of Kurdistan, we know you know these things. We would agree with you that it’s a great mnemonic, and add that 21 is a Fibonacci number and we are geeks for the Golden Mean, but sorry your guess is wrong, the favorable mnemonics don’t hurt, but they’re not why 21 is in our name.
You might guess that it’s because in numerology, the number 21 indicates a creative spirit and a reliable partner, and we’d say, we hadn’t thought of that, that is definitely us, but it’s not why we settled on the name for our company.
And then–
You’d guess that when our founders, Mike Bonifer, Donna Pahel and Joe Stafura, met in Pittsburgh for the first time, in April of 2018, to discuss a possible partnership, a 21-day story was a concept introduced to our respective teams by Pahel, the rest of us had never considered it before, and then at the end of our first day of meetings, Bonifer got invited by a friend, Ann Yoders, to visit the Roberto Clemente Museum, an extraordinary collection of memorabilia from one of baseball’s great heroes, built in a converted Pittsburgh firehouse, not open to the public, shown by its curator, the photographer Duane Reider, by appointment only, and that Bonifer was a huge Roberto Clemente fan because when he was growing up on a farm in Indiana, the Pittsburgh radio station KDKA would mysteriously bounce its signal off the ionosphere at night and carry Pirates games clear as a bell, to Bonifer’s Toshiba transistor radio, and that when Bonifer walked into the Roberto Clemente museum that day, many years and miles removed from the family farm in Indiana, he was suddenly confronted by a resurrected memory flying at him like the ghosts of ballplayers running to a dugout, the number 21 hangs everywhere in that museum — Roberto Clemente’s number was 21!! and the next day Bonifer showed up at the partners meeting and voted enthusiastically to call our company 21 Day Story, “because Roberto Clemente says so.”
And we’d say bingo! That’s it! You guessed right!
That’s why we settled on our name. All the science, information and metaphor supported the choice. But it was the emotional connection with Roberto Clemente that made it a story. Well, for Bonifer anyway. That’s his take. Talk to Joe Stafura and he’ll be all about the neuroscience supporting the 21 days to change a behavior. And it was Donna Pahel’s idea in the first place because she’s been running 21-day Agile sprints with her teams for years. The fact that we can each find meaning in the number by connecting it to our personal narratives is, more than anything, what makes 21 Day Story a great name for a company, and a great partnership.
