Is your name Sam Lee? If you have landed on this page, chances are the answer is yes, you have a friend who is named Sam Lee, or you are searching for someone named Sam Lee. Regardless, welcome!

If your name is indeed “Sam Lee,” you understand the pains of having an extremely common name. In the digital age, it’s gotten even more brutal. When your friends were easily swooping up email addresses, URLs, and social media accounts that prominently featured their names, you were busy exploring variations and fiddling with numbers to add to the end of your online monikers. You have likely grappled with thoughts and ideas that the average person simply did not have to spend an ounce of time dealing with.

I consider myself an early adopter of new communication and social media platforms. But even so, I have had to resort to the numbers extension game (usually quickly abandoned for the likes of my current Twitter handle). True story- I was extremely excited to be the first Sam Lee on Google+, only to discover that for common names Google didn’t allow people to grab the all-elusive no number name. Being SamLee1 on Google+ felt infinitely weak (unfortunately for the fine folks in Mountain View, no one outside of Google has been excited about it since). As I wallowed in e-disappointment, the e-universe continued to mock me through my last professional email account- slee23. There is no escape, but creativity can save us from the digital abyss.

There are, of course, benefits. For starters, there are a lot of interesting Sam Lees in this world. Among our ranks, there are gold medalists/civil rights heroes like Dr. Sammy Lee and college football players like BYU’s Sam Lee. There are many fine and interesting folks- an entrepreneur involved with Bitcoin startups, a food artist in Malaysia, a folk singer in the UK, and an actor in Hong Kong. I don’t want to give the last two guys links because they are doing alright with SEO on their own and likely messing it up for the rest of us! The silver lining there is that most of us are fairly hard to “Google” and the bar for being the best Sam Lee in the world is quite high. And after all, a little healthy competition and imagination is what helped humanity break the 4-minute mile…

The diversity of Sam Lees in this world is our strength. We are truly global- made up of all colors, genders, religions, and nationalities. There are many ethnic variations of names like “Sam Lee,” and while I feel their pain as well- it only adds to the whimsical delight of being a part of thousands of Sam Lees in the world. It is my hope that we can be an inclusive group as well- so Samanthas, Samelas, and other variations are acceptable. If Lee is a middle or maiden name, I think that qualifies as well.

And so I invite you, dear reader, to join the Sam Lee Directory by filling out the short questionnaire below. Have a friend named Sam Lee? Do your part, forward this page to them. All of us will have access to the list, and we may get closer to finding the answer to the question: how many people named Sam Lee are there in this world?

Have a look at “Sam Lee” Directory submissions thus far.

Sam Lee out