Learning and growth
Bruce Lee
Formless
Bruce Lee (Contemporary · 1940–1973) — Formless.
What actually happened?
At the Long Beach International Karate Championships in 1964 he gave a demonstration: the one-inch punch, which sent a much larger man backwards off a chair, and press-ups on two fingers. It was a demonstration, not a fight, and it was watched by people who could open doors. One of them passed word to a Hollywood producer, which produced a screen test, which produced Kato. A twenty-three-year-old teaching in a small Oakland school got the rest of his life out of a few minutes spent showing what a very short distance can carry.
Absorb, discard, add
His method compresses to three moves: take what is useful from every source, cut what does not work for you, and put in what is yours alone. It applies to any learning. The point is never to reproduce one master's system intact, but to draw from several and let practice settle the remainder into something of your own.
Finishing the course is not the goal and not finishing is not a debt. The question is which parts survived contact with your actual work.
A style that refuses to become a style
He built a martial art whose founding rule is not to be bound by any martial art, his own included. That is freedom one level up: not only thinking about the problem, but thinking about the way you go at problems. Most systems cannot do this, because a system that can refuse itself is hard to sell.
Any framework you cannot imagine abandoning has stopped being a tool and become a membership.
Knowing yourself comes before the technique
His notes keep returning to it: understand yourself before you learn anything external. What is your body actually built for, where does your attention fail, what do you do when frightened? Without that, absorb what is useful has no criterion, because useful is useful to somebody in particular.
Two people copy the same routine. It works for one of them, and the difference was decided before either of them started.
Thinking is a delay
He read philosophy seriously and was severe about substituting it for action. Knowledge exists to make the action better, not the conversation about the action better. Anything he could not test against a person trying to hit him he treated as unfinished.
The strategy that has been in review for six weeks has already lost to a worse strategy that shipped in the second week.
How do I use it today?
Next time you take up a new field, run his three steps: read widely without hurrying to find the right answer; actively delete the parts that do nothing for you, without guilt about not finishing; then add your own judgement in practice until the method is yours. The system belongs to whoever built it. The method has to be yours.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Knowing yourself is the most important knowledge of all.
Do not think too much. Feel, and hit.