My Life as an Octopus: A Generalist Framework for a Richer Life

I am this type of person, but I’ve never liked any of these terms:

• Polymath
• Multi-passionate
• Generalist
• Renaissance Man
• Jack of All Trades

Polymath sounds like something you learn in high school, and the average person has no clue what it means.

Multi-passionate sounds like you can’t make up your mind, plus I think “passion” is too strong a word.

Generalist sounds like an uninteresting person who is not particularly good at anything. Is anyone really excited to go to a “General Store”?

The Renaissance happened so long ago the average person today doesn’t know what it represents.

Jack of all trades is not inclusive of women, and saying Jack/Jill of all trades is cumbersome.

What to do?

We Need a New Term

I’ve been thinking about a better way to describe this type of person.

In Los Angeles I met some people who were light-heartedly into “spirit animals”, to describe their personality. Unlike the popular personality tests that give you a sterile 4 letter code or some kind of clinical description only a psychologist would use, spirit animals are a fun way to think about what kind of person you are.

I think there is a “spirit animal” that describes a curious person with a wide variety of interests, broad skills, and can intersect knowledge across multiple domains: the Octopus.

The octopus is one of the most interesting, unusual creatures on the planet. Here is just a subset of its attributes:

• Has the highest brain-to-body mass ratio of all invertebrates
• 8 arms that can operate in unison or independently
• 2/3 of its brain neurons are in the arms
• Can change color to camouflage themselves
• Inquisitive and curious
• Have no bones, thus are extremely flexible and can contort into a variety of spaces
• Independent and self-sufficient
• Exhibit complex learning, memory, and problem solving skills

Let us consider the attributes that apply to “Octopus People”:

• Have many diverse interests they explore simultaneously
• These interests can overlap or be completely disparate
• Curious, inquisitive, exploratory personality
• Highly adaptable/flexible
• Independent and self-sufficient
• Creative, learn quickly, and intelligent
• High problem solving ability by intersecting disparate concepts

Okay you get the point. I’m an octopus person. That’s how I’m going to describe myself from now on.

Octopus people don’t fit the prevailing mold

Think about all the terrible common advice Octopus people get in our specialist-focused culture:

• You need to pick one thing and stick to it
• Focus is a superpower
• Practice 10,000 hours on 1 thing
• Context shifting is killing your productivity
• Show up everyday and “grind”

But all this advice makes a huge underlying assumption: To be happy and successful in life, you must be the most focused, efficient, and narrowly minded person possible.

Is that really true? Is that the real definition of success?

What Octopus People Believe

What if we re-wrote the rules for us?

• Pick a wide variety of things
• Scanning is a superpower
• Practice for 1 hour on 10 things
• Context shifting fuels creativity
• Meander around and do what you feel like doing

If you think about where “specialism” came from, it essentially originated from greedy business men who were trying to extract maximum productivity out of workers. It was not designed to enrich life, provide meaningful work, satisfy human curiosity, make you happy, or keep life interesting. It was intended to convert us into diligent worker robots.

Is it any wonder over 80% of employees are “disengaged” at work? Is it any wonder so many of us are bored, stressed, angry, and miserable at our jobs? We’ve reduced work to such a narrow activity, then on top of that, placed upon it the impossible burden of making it the primary means of living a meaningful life. We want it to be our “calling”, our “life’s work”, our “mission” in life, but should it be?

Why you can’t figure out what to do with your life

How many of us are paralyzed because we can’t figure out the “one thing” to do with our lives? How many days, months, years even of navel gazing, figuring out what we’re best at, filling out Ikagai diagrams, taking personality tests, going to career coaches, etc are we going to spend trying to find out what the “one thing” is that we can do better than anyone else?

What if we’re asking the wrong question? What if there is no “one thing?” What if your life calling is to explore as many different things as possible? To enjoy as wide a variety of experiences as possible?

What do Octopuses do all day? Just one thing? No. They meander around. Explore their environment. Eat. Swim. Float. Change color. Feel coral. Fight off predators. Build dens.

Are we asking jobs to hold too much meaning?

Right now it feels like we put 80% of the weight on our jobs to provide us with a meaningful life. Probably because we spend so much time doing it. But who said we have to work so much? Remember that greedy business man? Before there were strong employment laws, he’d be happy to have you work 16 hours a day. He’d be happy getting 7 year old kids to work the assembly line until their fingers bled. Is there another way?

What if work was just 1 of 8 octopus “arms” that made life meaningful?

Just laying it out this way reduces the emphasis placed on work to provide the lion’s share of meaning in our lives. It’s just 1/8th of the sources of meaning.

Another way to look at this: as a thought exercise, imagine I offered you a job for $200,000 and you only had to “work” 1 hour a day. The rest of your day could be spend on the other 7 areas of life.

Compare the specialist work day calendar vs an Octopus Life Day. Which life would you rather have?…

Instead of squishing 7/8th of what gives life meaning into what few precious hours are left in the evening or on weekends, what if we could re-imagine our daily lives? I’m not proposing you spend your day in exact 1 hour blocks, but you get the point. Something is unhealthy about the typical Work Day model.

The Big But…

Ok I know what you’re thinking, how can you afford to live the Octopus Life working only 1 hour a day? Work is what generates an income, and unless you’ve won the lottery, or created some kind of 4 hour workweek business, this model is impossibly out of reach. If you have a job, your boss will fire you if you try to live an Octopus Life during the day. Fair enough. This edition is long enough, so I’ll address how I’m thinking about making "Octopus Money" in a future post.

Dave Kang