From the earliest moments of his childhood, Craig Foster was a student of the sea. He grew up in a wooden bungalow on the Atlantic shore, so close to the waves that they would come crashing in on stormy days and flood the entire house. Within minutes of coming home from the hospital with his newborn, Craig’s father held him in 12-degree (celsius) seawater for the first time. The Academy Award-winning nature documentarian describes that moment today as a kind of baptism, an initiation into his relationship with nature.

For his entire life, Craig has been closer to nature than most of us will ever be. And yet, much of his conversation with our founder and podcast host, Hitendra Wadhwa, was about nature’s mysteries—the things he is still learning today. In particular, Craig recalls the lessons he learned from the San people of the Kalahari, who are indigenous to South Africa and possess extraordinary animal tracking abilities.

“It was both very exciting and very disturbing for me because I realized, very quickly, that I was outside of wild nature and they were right inside,” the documentarian shared. From the language of a bird call, the shape of a bird’s flight, or the direction of a bird’s gaze, the San people could discern an unseen predator—both its species and its movement—from a kilometer away. “I was busy making these films. I was photographing a lot of wild animals, even diving with incredible creatures. But I wasn’t immersed inside that wild world. I couldn’t speak that ancient language.”

For Craig, this language was one he deeply wanted to learn. Endowed with a new understanding of what was possible after his time in the Kalahari, Craig returned to the natural arena that had been his very first backyard. He chose not to wear a wetsuit during his dives. Even its 3mm thickness posed an unwanted barrier between himself and his subject. Gradually, as Craig opened himself up to the mystery of the ocean, he saw it begin to reciprocate.

“It was very unexpected, but I could feel it immediately. ‘Oh my goodness, this animal no longer feels that I’m a threat at all.’” Craig knows it is rare for wild animals to fully trust a human, and he remembers the exact moment he felt that trust from an octopus he was tracking. This octopus became, for Craig, an treasured guide into the lives of cephalopods and the underwater world at large. To Hitendra’s suggestion of friendship as a term for their special bond, Craig insisted on emphasizing his subsidiary position. “She had such a powerful influence on me. She taught me so much about her species. It would be undermining or dishonorable to just call her my friend,” he explained. “I felt small in some ways in comparison to her. Each day, [it] was a privilege to learn more and more from her.”

Craig spent almost a year following his octopus guide, experiencing the natural world—beautiful and harrowing moments alike—by her side. He went on to honor their bond and all that she taught him in his extraordinary documentary My Octopus Teacher, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2020.

Craig took the opposite approach to what many of us do when we want to be great at something. Rather than casting a wide net or seeking something new, he realized how much there was to learn in the same underwater turf he’d explored as a child and visited it repeatedly, day in and day out, month after month. “If you really want to know nature,” he says, “you can fly around the whole world to exotic places, but it would be better just to visit your own backyard again and again and again.”

This is a beautiful insight, one that can guide us in our own quests to better understand the world beyond nature. Could you master the science of relationships, for example, by improving your relationships with just a few people, or even just one person? Could you master the laws of leadership simply by becoming a great parent?

Perhaps when the octopus reached out to touch Craig for the first time, he was not the only person meant to grow from the encounter, but so too all of us who have been privileged to witness his story. The path that led Craig to his octopus teacher, of striving to know things from the inside-out and know deeply before knowing broadly, has much to teach all of us in our own arenas of pursuit, whether that be far and wide across the world or many meters underwater.

Learn more about Craig’s work on his Sea Change Project website. Read Craig’s book, Underwater Wild: My Octopus Teacher’s Extraordinary World.