Bruce Lee on How to Live

" Empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless. Like water. You put water into a cup it becomes the cup; You put into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend. " - Bruce Lee  

Note: Excuse my second grade drawings

I always thought of Bruce Lee as some fierce, rock-hard ab, gung-fu artist. When I was obsessed with working out, I'd constantly google 'Bruce Lee' workouts and try to mimic them. However, I had no clue this dude wrote about philosophy, life and self-actualization.

Anyways, I picked up "The Warrior Within" by John Little and I was literally put to tears reading about his philosophy. 

I thought I'd share with you two things I learned from the book:

1. Self-Actualization

Copying Lee's philosophies would go against the very principles Lee stood by. As his son Brandon says:

"When I did The Green Hornet television series back in 1965, I looked around and I saw a lot of human beings. And as I looked at myself, I was the only robot there. I was not being myself. I was trying to accumulate external security, external technique- the way to move my arm and so on--- but 'such a thing had happened to me?' When I look around, I always learn to have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate him. That seems to me to be the prevalent thing happening here in Hong Kong. They always copy a person's mannerisms, but they never see beyond that. They never start at the very source, the very root of their own being, and ask the question: 'How can I be me?'"

Lee defined the summit of human achievement, not in success or financial reward, but by the honest expressing of oneself:

"In life, what more can you ask for than to be real? To fulfill one's potential instead of wasting energy on [attempting to] actualize one's dissipating image, which is not real and an expenditure of one's vital energy. We have great work ahead of us, and it needs devotion and much, much energy. To grow, to discover, we need involvement, which is something I experience every day--- sometimes good, sometimes frustrating. No matter what, you must let your inner light guide you out of the darkness." 

Because when I'm not in touch with my honest feelings, how can I expect to truly enjoy the juices of life? How can I truly create something original? There is no such thing as copied originality. Because the next Bruce Lee will not be Bruce Lee. The next Mark Zuckerberg will not be Mark Zuckerberg. The next Steve Jobs will not be Steve Jobs. 

But what does honest self-expression actually mean? I think it means to just know what you want from life, independent from the crowd. And that's really hard, because people, society, constantly hammer their un-grounded beliefs and ideas into your head. And if you're not careful, a nail might get lodged into your brain. 

But does this mean that I should discount advice from "successful" people and solely trust myself? I don't think it's that black and white. Lee outlines a four-step process he teaches in jeet kune do:

" 1) Research your own experience

2) Absorb what is useful

3) Reject what is useless

4) Add what is specifically your own "

Because the only way to develop an intuitive grasp of what works for me and what doesn't, can only come from experience.

2. Relationships

In addition to self-actualization, Lee beautifully articulates his beliefs on love:

" Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning, a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable."

Because long-term romance isn't the exciting, passion-filled romance of young, crazy adventures. It's that mundane, 6000th dinner, after a tired day of work:

"The happiness that is derived from excitement is like a brilliant fire--- soon it will go out. Before we married, we never had the chance to go out to nightclubs. We only spent our nights watching TV and chatting. Many young couples live a very exciting life when they are in love. So, when they marry, and their lives are related to calmness and dullness, they will feel impatient and will drink the bitter cup of a sad marriage" 

But Lee doesn't limit his definition of relationships to romance. The ultimate relationship is the one between life and death:

" Like everyone else, you want to learn the way to win, but never to accept the way to lose. To accept defeat-- to learn to die-- is to be liberated from it. Once you accept, you are free to flow and to harmonize. Fluidity is the way to an empty mind. So when tomorrow comes, you must free your ambitious mind and learn the art of dying." 

We learn to live by learning to die, while many of us are dying to live. We're in this constant searching for money, posessions, a lust, to allow us to start living. In reality, we don't need to ask the world for permission. We have permission. We just need to choose to use it. 

The Warrior Within by John Little is a beautiful book on the philosophies of Bruce Lee. Highly recommended.