Auto-generated description: An underwater view of octopus tentacles with air bubbles floating around them.

There are two types of people in life: those who make binary statements, and those who don’t.

But seriously, the older I get the more it feels l like there are some people who I’m drawn to who share certain qualities. A lot those qualities are described this this this post by Dave Kang outlining his Octopus Manifesto. The “octopus” part comes from having different “tentacles” focused on different things.

It’s been over a year now that I’ve been living the Octopus Way, and my thinking around this has evolved somewhat. When I first began this journey post-sabbatical, an octopus was just a more fun way to describe a generalist, polymath, or multi-whatever person.

But lately I’ve been wanting to draw the circle a little tighter, as I think Octopus People are actually a smaller subset of this group. One of the fun things about making up your own identity metaphor is you get to define the term. So in this edition I present my updated, tighter definition of an Octopus Person. I’m interested in finding my unique tribe of people, and I hope clarifying and narrowing my definition will help me specifically find more people who are in the same boat as me.

Without quoting paragraphs and paragraphs, here’s the first sentence of each of the numbered points on the manifesto:

  1. We walk our own life path.
  2. We are creative.
  3. We have unlimited curiosity.
  4. We tend to fly solo.
  5. We are octopreneurs.
  6. We like meandering.
  7. We are resourceful.
  8. We think different.

Source: Dave Kang’s Octopus Life

Image: Julia Kadel