The Octopus Knows When to Let Go. Do You?

As we have been learning over the last few weeks, the octopus is a remarkable animal. How many people do you know who truly are able to pull off a clean distract and escape move? Other than street magicians and Batman.

Not many, hopefully. But the octopus does this on the regular, popping out a cloud of ink when faced with an unanticipated predator, then escaping in the momentary distraction. The ink it emits isn’t just a colorful puff either, it actually contains tyrosinase which actively diminishes the predator’s sense of smell and taste simultaneously.

Current theories suggest that the ink jet mimics the shape of the octopus itself, and researchers believe predators briefly attack the ink cloud rather than the octopus in their confusion. While this is happening, the octopus jets off in a different direction leaving the predator disoriented … executing the inking and the escape in one smooth maneuver.

Sometimes the smartest move isn’t to fight, nor is it to hide, but to flee.

And sometimes, when they cut it a little close, or when curiosity gets the better of them, they might lose an arm in the process. But that’s okay … not only do they have 7 others, but the one they lost will fully regenerate in 4-5 months. The wound seals almost immediately through muscle contraction, resulting in minimal blood loss. And those other 7 arms? They redistribute and compensate almost immediately.

Similar to humans, oddly enough, the octopus will sometimes deliberately detach its arm if it’s in its best interest. Now, when your arm grows back in a few weeks, it’s a somewhat different proposition compared to losing it for life, making a movie about it, and going on a talk circuit to tell the cautionary tale of how your decisions led you to the moment where getting rid of your own arm seemed like the right thing to do … but, one way or another … consider this:

Neither giving up the arm nor using ink to escape is random. They are deliberate and serve an important function.

There is something to be said for knowing when to make a clean exit. Many business owners stay in a bad situation far too long because leaving, or moving on, feels like admitting failure. More often than not they are prolonging the inevitable, and when they finally are forced to act, the situation has metastasized into something far more onerous than it otherwise would have been.

The octopus doesn’t hang around to see how this whole interaction with the predator plays out. It doesn’t hope that it’ll resolve itself, or that maybe if it ignores it, it’ll just cease to be a problem … it doesn’t wait until it is tired and hungry before finally deciding to leave. Neither should you.

I’m not recommending you carry little vials of smoke powder around with you like Batman, and the moment you’re faced with adversity in the workplace, you dramatically throw one down and escape down the hallway towards your office. As fun as that might be. I am saying that you shouldn’t be afraid to leave or end a situation.

Similarly, business owners tend to wallow in and become defined by their losses. Maybe it was a service they discontinued, or a market they tried and failed to capture. Maybe it was as innocuous as a poor hiring decision or business investment. The market doesn’t know about it, nor does this mistake inform everyone that walks through the door. The market doesn’t care and is blissfully unaware. But these business leaders brand themselves with these failures, treat them like wounds that will never heal … or more insidiously, wounds they should never let heal.

Consider instead that you and your business are an octopus. As unpleasant as it is, sometimes you must cut off your business’s arm to save the greater whole. Sometimes your imperfections have consequences. Consequences that should be triaged, sealed up, mitigated, and built back from.

The loss you experienced was real. So too was the recovery. The question is whether you’re still mourning the arm or whether you’ve already started regrowing it.

What have you held on to for too long?

It’s time to let go and move on. And maybe it’s time to reach out to me.