The Octopus Never Waits for the Whole Picture. Neither Should You.

Octopodes, as they’re apparently known in quantity, have nine brains and the various benefits of such an arrangement. So too do business owners who allow themselves to leverage the time and expertise of the people they hire. We’ve talked about the autonomy of those other 8 brains. The millisecond response time to external stimuli. Now let’s consider as well what that really means. What it means to live as an octopus lives.

Octopodes have eyes on either side of their head, which means they have two separate fields of vision without any overlap like you or I have. That means their depth perception isn’t great, and they have a significant blind spot right in front of them. It also means that at any given moment they do not have the whole picture.

That doesn’t paralyze them. It doesn’t bother them at all, because to them that is natural. Their core brain only makes up one third of their processing power and I guarantee that it not only doesn’t have a clear visual picture, but the information it’s getting from its arms and the smaller brains within is incomplete.

Each arm is making independent sensory assessments simultaneously and feeding information upward in real time … while also continuing to act with what information that arm happens to have at the time.

As a result, their perception of reality is mercurial, and the octopus is acting, knowing that the reality it experiences, the information it has is always outdated.

The arms themselves have a more direct connection to the present moment than the central brain.

Their camouflage response happens faster than their brain can consciously process the environment. The decision to adapt is made before all the information is in. In laboratory settings, octopodes presented with novel problems they’ve never encountered engage, probe, try, and adjust.

They are figuratively building the plane as they fly.

Most of us live in a similarly clouded world where critical information is at best imperfect, and at worst missing altogether. And we wait, we put off the decision, or the change, hoping that the future will burn off that fog and give us the information we need to be confident in our action.

Attorneys, accountants, and financial advisors in particular are trained to gather as much information as possible before acting. It is an asset to their work for clients, but it is a liability in their business decisions. The same instincts that made them successful when they were small are preventing them from developing further.

Now I’m not saying you throw caution to the wind and go flying into the unknown with naught but a skip in your step and a song in your heart. There’s an important difference between reckless action and informed commitment.

As you move through your work, consider what decisions you have been avoiding … moves you’ve wanted to make but never felt like you could … until you learned more, until you could be sure.

You will never be sure.

What decision do you realistically have enough information to move on right now, even if it’s imperfect?

Where can you take a cautious step forward in the coming week to test your hypothesis … to gather the information you’ve been waiting for … to build your plane a little bit as you fly?

I would love to hear what some of those things are. Email me and let me know: [email protected].