Maybe It Was Already in There

A few days ago, my uncle sent me something he had found while researching our family history.

A name.

Philo Orator Dibble.

I read it again.

Philo.

Orator.

Dibble.

I don't know who looked at a brand-new baby and thought, You know what this kid needs? The second name Orator.

But I respect the confidence.

And I couldn't stop thinking about it.

Because orator isn't exactly an inconsequential word.

An orator is someone who speaks.

More specifically, someone who uses words to communicate ideas—to persuade, inspire, explain, move people.

And if you've known me for approximately eleven minutes, you can probably understand why this got my attention.

I have spent most of my life obsessed with communication.

Words.

Stories.

Why one sentence sticks and another disappears.

Why one person can explain something perfectly and no one moves, while someone else says essentially the same thing and suddenly everyone gets it.

I've built a career around communication.

I've taught.

I've written.

I've marketed.

I've coached.

I've stood in front of rooms and tried to figure out how to help the people inside them understand something, feel something or do something differently.

And lately, I've been building an entire body of work around the idea that the way we communicate and create experiences for other humans matters.

Then my uncle casually drops Philo Orator Dibble into the family group chat.

Excuse me?

For most of my life, when I've thought about where certain parts of me came from, I've looked toward one side of my family.

The Parkinson side.

My dad.

My grandpa.

My aunt.

My brother.

The big personalities.

The storytellers.

The people who can command a room, make somebody laugh and turn an ordinary event into a story worth retelling.

It made sense to me that whatever part of my brain is constantly narrating life probably came from there.

And maybe some of it did.

But suddenly, here was this name from the other side of the family.

Orator.

And it made me wonder:

What do we inherit, and what do we build?

We talk about inheritance mostly in physical terms.

Your mother's eyes.

Your father's nose.

Your grandfather's height.

The hairline everyone hopes skips a generation.

But what about the less visible things?

The way we notice.

The way we communicate.

The way we connect ideas.

The things that fascinate us before we understand why they fascinate us.

The tendency to make meaning out of ordinary moments.

The urge to tell somebody else what we just saw.

How much of that is learned?

How much is practiced?

How much is personality?

And how much was already quietly there?

I don't think finding a man named Philo Orator Dibble somewhere in my family tree proves that storytelling is genetically encoded in the Dibble bloodline.

That's probably a stretch.

But I also don't think that's really the point.

The point is how often we tell ourselves the story that we've invented ourselves from scratch.

We didn't.

None of us did.

We are collections.

Of people.

Of places.

Of experiences.

Of things someone taught us intentionally and things we absorbed simply because we were nearby.

We inherit tendencies.

Then life gives us experiences.

We practice things.

We make choices.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a person emerges.

We inherit. We experience. We practice. We choose. We become.

Maybe that's why discovering Philo felt so strangely meaningful to me.

Because I've spent years assuming that the parts of myself connected to language, storytelling and communication came from one particular branch of my family tree.

And then another branch quietly raised its hand.

Actually...

Maybe MoveMaker isn't only something I built.

Maybe it's something I inherited, transformed and made my own.

Not the business.

Not the name.

Not the frameworks or classes or stories or ideas.

The instinct underneath them.

The instinct to notice something happening between people and want to understand it.

To find the words for it.

To turn it around a few times.

To tell someone else.

To make meaning from a moment.

Maybe that instinct didn't begin with me.

And I love that.

Because legacy gets talked about like it's something enormous we leave behind.

A company.

A building.

A fortune.

A name carved into something.

But maybe legacy is much quieter than that.

Maybe it's a way of seeing the world that keeps showing up in people who never even met each other.

Maybe it's a phrase your grandfather always used that somehow comes out of your mouth thirty years later.

Maybe it's a particular kind of humor.

A stubborn streak.

A way of caring for people.

A fascination with words.

Maybe someone generations before you loved doing something they couldn't possibly have known would eventually become part of your life's work.

And maybe you don't carry their life forward.

You carry a little piece of their way of being.

That's different.

Legacy isn't repetition.

It's continuation.

We take what reaches us and do something new with it.

Which means we're not just inheriting.

We're also deciding what gets passed along next.

Our kids are watching.

Our coworkers are watching.

Our friends are watching.

The people in the rooms we walk into are absorbing pieces of us in ways we may never know.

Some of what we leave behind will be intentional.

A lot of it probably won't be.

And maybe, generations from now, someone will stumble across something about us and recognize themselves in it.

They'll laugh.

They'll wonder.

They'll say:

Well, that explains a few things.

Maybe the things we spend our lives becoming aren't always completely new.

Maybe sometimes we're uncovering something that was already there.

Move Like It Matters.