Renaming yourself means deliberately choosing a name that fits who you’re becoming instead of the one you were handed at birth. I did it in July 2024, from Johannes Larsson to John Talasi, after more than a year of sitting with the idea. It came down to meaning, freedom, and rewiring the single word I hear and see more than any other.
If you knew me before, you knew me as Johannes Larsson. People keep asking what happened, so here’s the full answer. Not because I owe anyone an explanation, but because I want you to actually think about it for yourself.
No, I haven’t become a full hippie (not more than I already was). No, I didn’t move to India to teach yoga. Same person. New name. And it’s a call I chewed on for over a year before I pulled the trigger.
The one premise renaming yourself rests on
There isn’t one reason. There are six, and I’ll get to all of them. But they all sit on top of a single idea.
We have choice over most of our life. Our work, our friends, our religion, our politics, our food, where we live. We can change any of it whenever we decide to.
Then there’s the stuff we don’t choose. Our parents, our genes, the weather, where we were born. Nothing to do about that.
Your name sits in a strange spot between the two. You didn’t pick it. But you can. So why don’t more people?
I’m not saying everyone should. But if you don’t like your name, for whatever reason (your parents had their own idea of a good name, and you got no vote), why be stuck carrying it forever? We change our city or our beliefs when they stop serving us. A name is no different.
It feels weird only because we inherited a set of rules some random people wrote a long time ago. Weird is not the same as wrong. After a year of turning it over, the question flipped on me. It stopped being “why would I change my name” and became “why not?”
That flip matters, because self-mastery starts the moment you stop treating the default as the only option. Here are the practical reasons.
1. A name that’s actually unique to me
I always liked the idea of a name nobody else carries, at least as far as the internet is concerned. Part of that is just taste. Part of it is function.
There are a handful of well-known people with my old name. Google it and you get a list of strangers. I ranked fine, but you still had to dig past other people to find me. Now there’s only one John Talasi. Easy to find, hard to confuse with anyone else.
2. A name with a deeper meaning
Honestly, “John” doesn’t mean much. It’s just the English version of Johannes, easier to say, and plenty of people already called me John because the original tripped them up.
The last name is where the meaning lives. Talasi comes from Thalassa, the Greek word for ocean.
I’ve been addicted to the ocean since I was a kid. I’d swim for hours, stay in until my skin went wrinkly, and nothing changed when I grew up. I still spend hours chasing waves most weeks. I can’t fully explain why. The water grounds me and resets me. And the ocean stands for freedom, which is my number one value in life. So I bent the Greek a little and made it mine: Talasi.
3. Building my own family name
This one sounds strange out loud, but the idea of starting a new family name genuinely excites me.
My old surname means nothing. Larsson comes from “Lars son,” an old Scandinavian patronymic habit. My father isn’t named Lars. It just became the most common surname in Sweden because some guy named Lars had a lot of kids a long time ago. For someone who cares about meaning (and has a mild dose of OCD), that’s far too random.
If I’d inherited a name we took pride in, I’d think twice. But this one points to nothing. Half my family doesn’t even share it. So breaking the chain of passing down a meaningless name, and creating one that actually means something for me and a future family, felt like the right move.
4. Better branding internationally
A Swedish name travels badly. Different nationalities mangled it in their own way, so I’d answer to a dozen versions of myself, some of them rough. I’ve been called everything from “Johannessen” to “Muhammas.”
I left Sweden at 19 and have no real ties there anymore. I’m not building for a Swedish audience, I’m building for an international one, so I wanted a name that works across languages. If you were starting a company aimed at a global market, you wouldn’t pick a name nobody can pronounce. A personal brand follows the same logic.
5. A clean slate for a new brand
The name change lined up with a bunch of other changes I wanted to make. So a real fresh start made sense. Drop the old, focus on the new.
There’s a power in a clean slate I struggle to put into words. I wanted to rebuild from scratch: rethink who I am, what I’m doing here, how I can serve people better. Spinning up new accounts also let me quietly leave behind the old followers, the old feed, the old content that no longer fit.
Not everyone needs a full teardown. Sometimes a small change is enough. But if you feel a fresh start calling, don’t be scared to take a sledgehammer to the old house so you can build the one you actually want.
6. Rewiring myself, on purpose
There’s no word you hear and see more often than your own name. You’ll meet it a million times across your life.
Think about it. You log into your computer and see it. Your social profiles, your WhatsApp, your bank account, people calling out to you. It’s everywhere. Whatever your name is tied to in your head, it fires those associations again and again, day after day.
This is the part that connects directly to self-mastery. If a repeated input shapes your state, you’d want that input to pull you toward the version of yourself you’re trying to become, not away from it. So when you’re choosing a new name for yourself, you pick one that reinforces something good: a reminder of who you’re growing into, or just a sound that lands well on your ears. Change the variable that repeats most often in your life, and the output shifts with it.
Small bonus: clean social media handles
Minor, but real. A unique name means clean handles. No “johanneslarsson5403,” no awkward alias I never wanted that’s half-taken across platforms anyway.
Now I’m just John Talasi everywhere. Same handle on every platform, because it’s my name and nobody else’s.
The takeaway: you’re allowed to choose
Here’s the principle underneath all six reasons. Most of what runs your life is a default someone else set, and you kept it because changing it never crossed your mind. Renaming yourself is one of the cleaner ways to prove to yourself that the default is a choice, not a sentence. The spiritual meaning people attach to changing your name is really just that: reclaiming authorship over something you assumed was fixed.
You don’t have to change your name to get the lesson. But find the things you’ve been carrying on autopilot and ask whether they still fit who you’re becoming. That’s the work. If you want more on this kind of identity-level shift, the rest of my soul alignment writing lives here, and if you’re rebuilding around people who think this way, that’s exactly what we’re doing inside Rise Society.
That’s it. Hope I didn’t stir up too much chaos about your own name.
Over and out,
John
Rise through self-mastery