Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee

I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine….

If you can’t feel the dream in your heart and see it in your mind’s eye, then it may not be your dream. It may be someone else’s. Your dream should excite and entice you. It should make all the hard work and potential struggle you are going to have to put into it worth it, because it is all yours.

Life is not a competition; it's a cocreation.

But goals are still incredibly useful as long as we don’t forget to be present and fluid with them. My father would, in fact, encourage you to set goals and to make at least one definite move daily toward them. He would suggest that to strive actively to achieve some goal will, in fact, give your life meaning and substance. But he would also caution that a goal is not always meant to be reached. Rather it simply serves as something to lean into, a future to live toward. The point, really, is in the doing and not in the outcomes. The maximizing of one’s potential is not the tallying of accomplishments, but the continual engagement in life as a process of unlimited growth.

No matter what, you must let your inner light guide you out of the darkness.

I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once. But I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.

Patience is not passive. On the contrary, patience is concentrated strength.

The goal isn’t not to fail; the goal is to fail faster so that the lessons from the failures can be implemented and lead you to success more quickly.

One key indicator that the ego is in the driver’s seat rather than your soul is the word “should.” If your decisions come from a place of “should” much of the time, then you’re not necessarily being guided by your true, essential self. You may be giving up your authority to whomever the arbiters of “should” are—your parents, your partner, your teacher, your religion, society, etc.

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.

Do you know how I like to think of myself? As a human being. Because under the sky, under the heavens, there is but one family.

I am on a path of understanding more and more about myself every day and shifting my perspective just like my father did. I’m becoming more conscious about what I’m ignoring or denying, and my learning process has become faster, my struggles fewer and less intense.

People have to go through skillful frustrations, otherwise they have no incentive to develop their own means and ways of coping with the world. - Bruce Lee

In his book A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle says, “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is.

try to meet each conversation, each interaction, and each experience with a willingness to consider something new without the burden of your judgment in the process.

It is not to be without emotion or feeling but to be one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked.” It is not to deny or bury or go around your feelings or your thoughts about those feelings. It is to feel them, acknowledge them, and work with them—to understand what they are trying to tell you about you, about the situation—to let them show you where there is more work to be done without letting them overwhelm, unbalance, or trap you. They have information for you. Take the information, say thank you, and keep going.

When you have mastery in combat, you not only meet a fight with composure and skill, you become an artist of movement, expressing yourself powerfully in the immediate, unfolding present with absolute freedom and certainty.

Knowing is not enough,” he said. “We must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.

At one point he said "Some may not believe it, but I spent hours perfecting whatever I did." He worked not only on sculpting the body but at shaping his mind, educating himself, evolving his practices, developing his potential. He also worked at the little things, like having beautiful handwriting, writing and speaking grammatically well, developing a colloquial understanding of English through joke-telling, learning how to direct a film - the list goes on and on. And as a result, he created a legacy that continues to be relevant forty-seven years after his death.

Do not be tense, but ready; not thinking, but not dreaming; not being set, but flexible. It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware, and alert; ready for whatever may come.…

Above all, don’t start from a conclusion.

People have to grow through skillful frustrations, otherwise they have no incentive to develop their own means and ways of coping with the world.

My father considered himself fully weaponized, not only because he was a skilled fighter and in peak shape, but because he knew how to harness his will.

You have a choice in how you respond to anything that happens in your life. You may think that you don’t, but you always do. Remember, first and foremost, that a response is also an inward state of being. You may be conditioned to respond in a particular way, and that conditioning may seem ironclad, natural, and unquestionable to you, but it’s always just one option no matter how ingrained. No matter what happens to you, you hold the power to determine what comes next. You are in charge of your reaction, and in this way, you are all powerful. Remember, my friend, it’s not what happens that counts; it is how you react. Your mental attitude determines what you make of it, either a stepping stone or a stumbling block. Walk

When you stop resisting life—even the hard parts of life—then you start to be a part of life, and life takes you under its wing and says to you, “Look. This is how we live.” And after a time, you realize you are ready to stop swirling around and around in that little eddy at the riverbank because you know yourself to be the stream, and it becomes safe to let yourself flow forth again.

The complexity of life means that every single moment and situation and challenge is new, maybe only slightly so, but still worthy of your presence and pliability nonetheless.

My dear friend and colleague Chris gave me the novel Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, translated by Charles S. Terry. It’s about real life seventeenth-century samurai Miyamoto Musashi, who wrote The Book of Five Rings (which my father had in his library), and I came across a passage in the novel that I think captures the living void beautifully:

Fear,” my father explained, “compels us to cling to traditions and gurus. There can be no initiative if one has fear.” He goes on to say that “the enemy of development is pain phobia—the unwillingness to do a tiny bit of suffering. As you feel unpleasant, you interrupt the continuum of awareness and you become phobic.

beyond them. The Six Diseases If we want to look at how we practice all forms of rivalry, there are six diseases my father wrote about, all of which stem from the desire we have to win at all costs. These diseases rely on being in competition, which is typically where we go in a relationship the moment any discord pops up. When we relate to others in these ways, we are disconnecting from them and disconnecting from our true selves in order to access some form of outside validation. In other words, there is no relationship, no collaboration, no cocreation. There is only the victor and the loser. The Six Diseases are: The desire for victory I have to be the winner. If I don’t win, I’m a loser. If I win, everyone else is a loser. The desire to resort to technical cunning I rely on the power of my wits to show you how great I am. Who cares about people or their feelings as long as everyone can see how clever I am? The desire to display all that has been learned Check me out. I know lots of things. I can speak at length about anything. It doesn’t matter what anyone else has to say (especially if it’s dumb). The desire to awe the enemy I am a force to be reckoned with. Look out! I will wow you to get your approval even if I have to do something shocking and wild to get your attention. The desire to play the passive role I am so easy to get along with. Who wouldn’t like me? I am so unobtrusive and sweet. I will put anything that’s important to me aside to make sure that you see how likeable and wonderful I am. How could you not like me when I sacrifice everything just for you? The desire to rid oneself of whatever disease one is affected by I am not okay as I am. I will perform constant self-work and read as many books as I can and take so many classes to make myself good that you will see that I am always trying to be a good person even if I continue to do lots of shitty things. I know I’m not okay as I am. And I know you know that I know I’m not okay as I am, which makes it okay not to get truly better as long as it looks like I’m trying.