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The Eternal Student

Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a constant state of learning.

The Classical Mess

By 1964, my father had established his second martial arts school in Oakland, California. He was married to my mom, and they were expecting their first child, my brother, Brandon. My father’s schools, in Seattle and now Oakland, called the Jun Fan Gung Fu Institutes, were teaching a slightly modified form of wing chun, the martial art he had learned in Hong Kong as a teenager. I say “slightly modified” because my father had started to contemplate and experiment with shifts in technique—these were very small deviations from the traditional norm, such as a slight angling of the foot here, more movement at the waist there, quicker initiation of movement in response to an opponent, etc. But for the most part, he was still teaching wing chun.

But because he was Bruce Lee and because he was twenty-four, he was a bit of a loudmouth. He was also bucking tradition in ways that annoyed the Chinese kung fu old guard in San Francisco’s Chinatown community. My father would give demonstrations at the Sun Sing Theater in Chinatown, and he would talk loudly and brashly about how many of the Chinese martial arts were bogged down by unnecessary, wasted motions, using the term “classical mess” repeatedly to disparage other traditional kung fu styles. He would then challenge people to come up onstage and see if they could best his technique.

As if that weren’t enough to ruffle feathers, he also opened his schools to people of all races and backgrounds. In the eyes of the kung fu establishment, traditions were meant to be adhered to, and while the occasional non-Chinese might find their way into Chinese kung fu classes from time to time, there was certainly not an open-door policy to the general public. Bruce was disrespectful and “ruining” the old ways, and for the traditionalists in Chinatown, this would not stand.

In late 1964, the San Francisco Chinatown community issued a challenge against my father. They’d had enough of this bold young man and his rebellious ways, and they were going to do what they could to silence him. They proposed a challenge match to be fought at my father’s school in Oakland. If their champion won, Bruce Lee would cease teaching, and if my father won, he could continue on unimpeded. Of course, my father accepted the challenge. He was definitely not going to allow anyone to dictate his life in this way, and he was highly confident that he would be successful. He had faith in his ability, and there was no way he wasn’t going to stand up for himself and his beliefs, no matter the outcome.

It may sound like something out of a movie, but this was real life for my family. My mother, who was several months pregnant at the time, was there for the fight, along with my father’s good friend and assistant instructor James Lee (since deceased). The group from Chinatown, which were several in number, assembled at my father’s school in November of 1964 for the match. They presented their champion, a random fighter who they selected because of his prowess but who was not engaged in the matter directly, and then they began to lay down the rules. No eye gouging, no shots to the groin, no this, no that … This is where my father stopped them.

There would be no rules.

My father proclaimed that if they were indeed seeking to threaten his livelihood and attempt to shut down a very essential part of his being, then the match would have to be a real fight with nothing held back. The fight would end with a knockout or a submission. That was it. The Chinatown guys conferred briefly and agreed. Everyone moved to the side of the room, and without further ado, my father came out swinging.

The fight itself was very unorthodox. After the exchange of initial blows, the opponent took off running with my father trying to grab ahold of him and attack from the back. Traditional technique had taken a back seat to survival, and the blows were sloppy and a bit wild. The fight lasted all of about three minutes. My father’s opponent ended up on his back, my father standing over him, fist poised, yelling in Cantonese, “Do you give up?! Do you give up?!” And finally, the man submitted and replied, “I give up.”

After everyone had left, my father sat outside his school on the curb with his head in his hands like a defeated man, even though he had clearly won. My mother approached him and asked why he seemed upset. He should be celebrating, shouldn’t he?

Yes, he had won. But he’d come away with something more powerful than the self-satisfaction of victory. Up to this point, when my father was giving demonstrations of his technique, he might say something like, “Try to hit me.” Or “Try to block my punch.” But those promptings were within the comfortable realm of his experience. That is to say, there was a certain level of expectation in what might happen in those scenarios; they were contained. But this fight had been different. It had tested him in a new way.

First of all, he’d had to chase this man around the room—not something you usually have to do in a fight—and he’d become winded. Secondly, he’d had to attack someone from the rear who was running away—also not something anyone practices in martial arts. And finally, they had done away with traditional stances, rules, and exchange of measured blows, and though my father had been the one to make this request, he still had not been totally prepared for what occurred.

The fight had shown him things about himself that he’d not previously known, particularly that he was not in great physical condition. Don’t get me wrong; he was in fine shape, but he had attained that shape through the practicing of martial arts techniques only. He hadn’t been cross-training or working on pure physical fitness. After the fight, he also saw clearly that his traditional wing chun training hadn’t prepared him for an “anything goes” scenario. He had still won. He had kept his cool, and he’d delivered blows, but they’d been improvised and made him feel haphazard and out of control. He had seen how much more he had to consider and how much more he had to learn.

As it turns out, this fight would be a pivotal moment in my father’s life. Had he not been “empty” enough to make room for a true assessment of the entire situation, he might have missed out on seeing all he had to learn. He could have high-fived his friend James, hugged my mom, gone out for a nice meal, and told his friends all about how he’d sent those old Chinatown guys packing. But then you probably wouldn’t know his name today. And I certainly wouldn’t be writing this book.

Instead of reveling in his victory, my father used the lessons of the fight to begin a long, personal journey. He became interested in what it meant to be a well-rounded, physically fit, and fully creative fighter, what it meant to release oneself of limitations, and, most important for our purposes, what it meant to be a fluid human being.

Shortly after that fight, my father started to consider the physical realities of combat, and what might be possible when one wasn’t bound by the traditions or norms of any particular style. This was the great revelation of his martial career, and the beginning of the art of jeet kune do. As a symbol and testament to his seriousness about this new journey, he reached out to metalworker, friend, and student George Lee and asked him to create something for him.

He sent George a sketch of a miniature tombstone and asked that the headstone read: In memory of a once fluid man crammed and distorted by the classical mess. This tombstone was my father’s reminder that his limited, rigid, traditional approach must “die” in order for him to rise again as his original fluid self. It was a reminder to move forward like flowing water.

No Masters Allowed

Each man must seek out realization himself. No master can give it to him.

My father never wanted to be called a master. He said, “Once you say you’ve reached the top, then there is nowhere to go but down.” Instead he considered himself to be the eternal student—always open to new ideas, new possibilities, new directions, and new growth.

He saw his process as the peeling of layers of a never-ending onion—always uncovering new layers of his soul, and revealing new levels of understanding:

My life it seems is a life of self-examination: a self-peeling of myself, bit by bit, day by day. More and more it’s becoming simple to me as a human being, more and more I search myself, and more and more the questions become listed. And more and more I see clearly. I am happy because I am growing daily and honestly don’t know where my ultimate limit lies. To be certain, every day there can be a revelation or a new discovery that I can obtain.

These are the words of a man passionate about learning. This focused enthusiasm for understanding and growth lit him up and unleashed him. It gave him permission to explore and create and was a hallmark of his genius. He made connections between disciplines and ideas where others weren’t even looking because he had an open mind and was the consummate experimenter.

For instance, when it came to developing his art of jeet kune do, he delved not just into standard martial arts for inspiration and information; he looked at Western boxing, fencing, biomechanics, and philosophy. He admired the simplicity of boxing, incorporating its ideas into his footwork and his upper-body tools (jab, cross, hook, bob, weave, etc.). And from fencing, he began by looking at the footwork, range, and timing of the stop hit and the riposte, both techniques that meet attacks and defenses with preemptive moves. From biomechanics, he studied movement as a whole, seeking to understand the physical laws of motion while understanding biological efficiencies and strengths. And within philosophy, he read widely from both Eastern and Western writers, such as Lao Tzu, Alan Watts, and Krishnamurti, while also picking up popular self-help books of the day. He was open to all inspiration and all possibilities—his only limit being the limit of his own imagination and understanding.

I’ve come to develop a great fondness for experimentation in my own life. I run small tests and scenarios all the time to see what personal insights the results may bear. I’ve done everything from trying to say yes to all invitations for a certain amount of time to sitting with a particular chant for a specific number of days to drinking warm lemon water every morning. I’ve participated in rituals and workshops that appeal to me or followed my intuition fanatically for a period or decided consciously to engage in a particular relationship to see where it goes. And nowadays, during all these experiments, I try to hold the posture and stance of emptiness—nonjudgment and openness—so that I can try to really see, feel, and understand the optimal way of being for me.

Oftentimes it happens that I don’t see an experiment through, and then there’s information in that as well. Did I not stick to it because it wasn’t working for me? Or did I stop because it was too hard or because I had some sort of blind spot or blockage that I ran up against? The possibilities for learning and growth are endless if you’re prepared to dig in.

Most important, this position of experimentation makes everything a little less heavy and a little more fun. The new framework of curiosity and possibility can take the stress or fear out of the feeling that your decisions are monumentally fixed and finite. Set life up like an experiment, investigate and be open to the findings, and the heaviness of living may ease just a bit.

Put on Your Researcher’s Hat

We did a program at the Bruce Lee Family Company that my friend and colleague Sharon Lee developed called Creative Fridays. One of the first assignments we were given was to go and participate in something that we were interested in or curious about but had never tried or experienced before. This meant we got to put on our researcher hats and go into the field as explorers.

I’m generally a little introverted by nature and sometimes find it challenging to enter social situations and converse comfortably, always relying on the hope that someone else will be a stellar conversationalist, and I can just hitch a ride. But when I was able to operate in the framework of researcher, I suddenly had a whole new perspective. I no longer had to be the nervous, conversationally challenged person with nothing to say. Instead I was on a mission of discovery. I could take the spotlight off me and put it squarely on the people I was researching.

With this newfound freedom, I said yes to all sorts of classes and social situations I had always been interested in but had never tried—breath work, parties where I didn’t know anyone, Reiki. I was able to observe and converse with the others around me, and as a result I got to practice being a more open version of myself.

This stance of curiosity can be both freeing and engaging. Instead of being a passive participant, a bystander who waits to be called on or someone who puts all the pressure on themselves to be dazzling, you can give yourself the role of the adventure seeker, the detective, the journalist, or the anthropologist. When you become actively engaged, even just observationally, and look through the lens of curiosity, a whole new world will open up to you, and nothing will be as dull or as scary as you imagined.

This is the advice I’m always trying to give my teenage daughter when she tells me she’s bored or that her teacher is lame. I tell her to challenge herself to see what she can discover and find interesting. Make it a game. See what there is to learn and observe about any situation. For instance, pause right now and take in your surroundings. Are you in a coffee shop? Are you at home in bed? How do you feel? Is this book engaging you? Do you feel energized and interested? Or is it a struggle to get through it and you’re falling asleep? Are you in one of your happy places? Or are you distracted by noise and getting frustrated? What can you learn about yourself? Can you see what is frustrating you right now—this book, the noise, something that happened earlier today? What would you do differently? Or is this perfection? What can you learn about yourself right now that maybe you didn’t already know?

There is always something to note. And sometimes the most valuable thing you discover is that what you’re doing or where you are is not where you want to be—and that gives you the opportunity to begin charting a path out of there! That kind of information can be pure gold. It can save you from continuing to pursue a path that is leading you away from your soul.

Research Your Own Experience

One of the core mandates of jeet kune do and my father’s life was this process: “Research your own experience. Reject what is useless. Accept what is useful. And add what is essentially your own.”

As we saw in the opening story, it was extremely important that my father took full stock of his experience in that Oakland fight. Had he felt troubled by certain aspects of his victory but just casually pushed them aside until later (or until never, as is often the case), he would have missed a huge opportunity to grow and evolve. But because he took heed and gave serious attention to the entirety of his experience, in particular the troubling bits, he created a new art form and philosophy and went on to change the landscape of martial arts globally.

While Bruce Lee’s life provides us with an impressive example, remember that we are focusing on you here, and the course and direction of your life. His life story is complete in the form of Bruce Lee. Yours is ongoing. And Bruce can be an amazing pointer of the way. In fact, he himself said:

Remember, I am no teacher; I can merely be a signpost for a traveler who is lost. It is up to you to decide on the direction. All I can offer is an experience but never a conclusion, so even what I have said needs to be thoroughly examined by you. I might be able to help you to discover and examine your problem by awakening your awareness. A teacher, a good teacher that is, functions as a pointer to truth but not a giver of truth.

Another way to say this is: Don’t give up your sovereignty or personal power. Claim your own path and your own experience. Be respectful and grateful for the signposts you encounter, the lessons you learn, and the teachers who point the way, but remember that you and you alone are responsible for your path and your growth.

As we discussed, there is always something to note about your experience. The best place to start is with how something makes you feel—energized or flat? Engaged or bored? This allows us to assess everything we experience with discernment and figure out what speaks to who we are. In this way, we are attempting to attain (or to remember) our nature. Recall that water stagnates and evaporates when it is not given what it needs to be itself—movement and connection to its source. In order for us to research our own experience, we need to be learning from what’s around us—we need to be in full flowing connection to assess and pursue the energy that makes us feel most alive and good and essentially ourselves.

Understand Your Ignorance

The tricky part of researching our own experience is that we often don’t understand our own ignorance. What is our own ignorance? It is a lack of understanding of our true selves—our soul, as it were. We do not understand what part we play in the creation of our lives so we point the finger outward rather than in. And that problem comes from ego. We frequently think we know what we want or what path we should be going down because our ego tells us what it thinks is best for us. Gary Zukav, in his book The Seat of the Soul, paints this as the struggle between the wants and needs of the personality versus those of the soul. So how do we tell the difference between what is of our ego, and what is of our soul or essence?

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.

Another time to watch out for the ego is whenever you find yourself overly interested in how you are perceived. The ego comes through in the image you have of yourself, and the attachment you have to being identified a specific way by others—i.e. your reputation. If you worry about what others think of you, if you need people to think you are a nice person, if you never want to be the bad guy, if you need to have the fancy house and car, then your ego is hard at work. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having nice things or being a nice person, but does this drive how you act to the detriment of your peace of mind? Do you obsess over what others think and feel about you? Do you do things you don’t really want to do because you need to be perceived a certain way? Is your self-worth dependent on external circumstances?

Once we’ve determined if we’re operating from our ego self rather than our true self, how do we take it a step further to understand the cause of our own ignorance—especially if we are in fact ignorant of the source of the problem in the first place? Discovering our ignorance is actually a deep concept in Buddhist texts, looking at how we suffer because we place our happiness (or lack thereof) on attachments to things outside of ourselves. My father often spoke about this. Discovering our ignorance requires a lot of self-awareness and honesty, but it’s possible to do so even if we are not yet totally self-aware. We just need to decide to really look. So where to begin?

One place you can start is with the “should”-ing. Listen to yourself and observe how you feel when someone presents you with a choice and you feel a “should” coming on. Your mom wants you to come for Thanksgiving. You have the thought you “should” go. How does that “should” make you feel? Alive? Or muted? If it makes you feel energized, then your “should” is actually an expression of your true self and therefore not a “should” but a recognition of something that is essential to you—family time, travel, etc. It is an expression of your heart. But if it makes you feel heavy or shut down (even just a little bit), that’s something to take a look at. Why aren’t you excited? Why does it feel heavy? Investigate! It may not change the decision, but it can illuminate the cause and help give you more clarity and more freedom. It can help you get to the bottom of what’s of value to you and where you might need to do some work.

There are also clues in the word ignorant itself, which is rooted in the word ignore. What are you ignoring in your life? What thoughts keep nagging at you that you push away? What feelings come back again and again that you shove down and deny? What patterns keep playing out over and over in your life? I know a guy who is always telling me that people are bad-mouthing him and saying he’s duplicitous. He tells me that it’s not true; it’s all gossip and rumors, and he doesn’t know why everyone says these things about him all the time. Without a stance on what is true and not true, my suggestion to him is to ask himself the following: What is he doing or not doing that is making people feel ill at ease about his integrity? Then he can investigate with the intent to really look at himself and see what others might be seeing, and ultimately decide for himself if there are changes he needs to make.

Of course, some of the things that are actually good for you come with “shoulds” too, like “I should eat better” or “I should exercise more.” These “shoulds” may be exactly what you need, but because you are “should”-ing them and/or pushing them away and ignoring them, they can feel heavy and therefore need to be examined. And perhaps it’s not the eating or the exercising that’s actually the issue, but your core wounds that are keeping you from showing up for yourself—wounds you continue to ignore.

Personally, I soothe with food and always have. Shifting that pattern has been a continuous struggle throughout my life. I probably vaguely recognized that I was doing it in my thirties. Then I berated myself for doing it for another decade but still had no way to change it. Food became a conduit for reward and punishment, for defiance and control, and for comfort and happiness, too. And you can’t just stop eating altogether—food is necessary fuel!

Simply knowing it was happening wasn’t leading me to a solution, in part because I wasn’t actively trying to solve the problem in a curious and open way. I was acknowledging the existence of the problem but was too overwhelmed to do anything about it other than what was socially acceptable—complaining, being self-deprecating, following crazy diet and exercise fads, sometimes being a little overweight, sometimes feeling bad about myself, sometimes not. But I certainly wasn’t looking for the cause of the issue. I’m not obese, I’d think, so how much of a problem is it really?

Well, if something is occupying a lot of your mental and physical energy, then it’s a problem whether it’s manifesting physically or not. And it’s going to keep you locked into a life of ongoing inner struggle and personal negativity if you don’t deal with it. After all, if you’re honest with yourself, you already know what those things are that plague you internally, even if you don’t know what to do about them.

Then one day in my early forties, I was recounting a memory to someone about my father’s death. I was telling them about the visceral memories I had surrounding the Hong Kong funeral. It was a feeling of chaos. There were thousands of people lining the streets, large crews from every news outlet, fans crying on the sidewalks. It was an open-casket affair, and my mother, brother, and I were dressed in traditional white Chinese mourning garbs. We had to make our way in front of my father’s body in full view of the TV cameras and photographers and do our bowing ritual before sitting on the ground in front of his coffin. I remember the chaos like a tornado swirling all around me, while I myself was shut down in the eye of the storm. I was numb and probably in a state of shock; after all, I was only four years old.

After the service, some kind human took me by the hand and said, “Come on. Let’s go get some candy.” And I remember thinking, “Yes! Give me something that will make me feel some form of happiness right now that I can relate to.”

And just like that, forty-something-year-old me had a revelation, mid-story, about one of the origins of my food issues. It is definitely not every piece of the puzzle, but it was enough of a connection for me to understand one cause of this lifelong issue. It had been there all along, but I hadn’t connected to it because I wasn’t really looking. I’d been hiding from the feeling of the death of my father and, in hiding from the feeling, I’d obfuscated a true look at this destructive pattern. My sense of safety had become wrapped up in a piece of candy (or a whole bag, knowing me), and I’d been operating under the hypothesis that my eating ineptitudes could only be controlled through strong denial of myself. [Pro tip: nothing is ever truly healed or resolved this way.]

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. This revelation about my self-soothing habits, while not the full solution, had given me something to explore, which led to an understanding of what else might need looking at. As my father himself said:

Learning is discovery, the discovery of the cause of our ignorance; it is discovering what is there in us. When we discover, we are uncovering our own abilities, our own eyes, in order to find our potential, to see what is going on, to discover how to enlarge our lives, to find means at our disposal to help us cope and grow. Don’t be in a hurry to “fix” things; rather, enrich your understanding in the ever-going process of discovery and find more of the cause of your ignorance.

The Beginning of Really Seeing

My food breakthrough happened very haphazardly, but it doesn’t have to be so haphazard for you. Let this be a cautionary tale of how many years of struggle can be avoided if you just proactively decide instead to get conscious and start paying attention. Because, let’s be honest, if I wanted to know that information sooner, I could have chosen to look more closely and see what was there. So I encourage you to open yourself and look deeply, even when it’s painful or scary.

I’m not going to lie to you: It takes courage to look at your issues, it requires work to release them, and you may be frustrated at times. You may feel as if you don’t know what you’re doing or what the next best step is. It may shake you off what you thought was your foundation and make you feel a little insecure. You may decide it’s just easier not to look or know and just put up with the soul discomfort for the rest of your life. But as you gain skill and practice, you will learn to develop ways to grow past that which scares you. And it will get easier—and your process will actually become so intriguing to you that it will start to engage your enthusiasm.

In the Oakland fight, my father was able to feel his struggle points, his frustrations, and his fear, and rather than running from or burying those, he said to himself, “Let’s take a closer look.” He believed that “to understand your fear is the beginning of really seeing.” You have to be willing to look at the problematic pieces. If you won’t look, and look deeply, then you will never discover an important layer of yourself—a layer that may be holding you back or sabotaging you over and over again and blocking your healing and growth.

Understanding your fear is a very important step in maximizing your potential. “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.” The key then is to integrate these uncomfortable moments into your attention and awareness rather than turn away from them. And when you confront your fears, a miraculous thing happens: They lose their power over you. They become just another puzzle piece in the process of knowing yourself, another point of interest, another layer of discovery along the way.

Remember, don’t beat yourself up over your fears or your shortcomings. We all have them, and they are just a road map for where you need to dig in and discover. And, as you are about to see, there’s a flip side to what we consider our weaknesses.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Weaknesses and strengths are inextricably connected. You may think of them as separate—you have your weaknesses and then you have your strengths. Well, I’ve come to think of this duality of faults and assets as an IRL expression of yin yang. In looking more closely at myself, I’ve realized that I can’t claim pride in my abilities without acknowledging their deficits as well and vice versa. For example, I’m very good at being alone. I like to be still and silent. I am strong and self-sufficient, and I’m not easily bored. And at the same time, I sometimes isolate myself and then find it hard to connect with people. I don’t ask for help when I could really use it. I’m good at muscling through life, but I can become drained and exhausted by this.

I’ve also discovered from many different experiences that I like variety. I like variety in what I eat, in my workday, and in things I do. I feel a kinship with spontaneity, surprises, and new experiences (even troubling ones). So naturally, and conversely, I struggle with routine. It took me until I was in my thirties to incorporate washing my face every night into my daily routine. I have a hard time paying bills on time and going through my mail regularly. I struggle with going to the grocery store and washing the dishes.

My strength of enjoying going with the flow and having new experiences makes handling the necessary, the routine, and the mundane hard for me. Discovering this about myself and realizing that my perceived “faults” were intimately tied to my strengths has helped me to keep perspective and maintain a sense of balance as I move through life. It also helps with not beating myself up, because every perceived weakness has a strength attached, and every strength, a weakness. So if I’m going to berate myself for my weaknesses, then I should be celebrating my strengths as well. Or we could just not make either thing good or bad and instead be with what is and keep moving forward (like water) toward the balance of flow we seek.

Self-knowledge is a game of balance—of understanding what we actually need in any given moment to flow through life. We need both rest and action. We need alone time and social time. We need self-reliance, and we need help. And we only come to understand in what way we need these things through investigating our true nature.

Ask yourself what you can discover about you. Start small. What can you learn about yourself from your favorite TV shows? What can you learn about how you want to be in the world from how you run your business or how you interact with your coworkers? What about from the challenging relationships you have and the conflicts you encounter? And what can this information tell you about the balance you need to strike between your strengths and weaknesses? What impulses do you need to control, and what controls do you need to loosen?

Maybe your favorite TV shows reveal that you love to laugh and see the romantic side of life, that you prefer beautiful ideals and joyous endings. But maybe this also reveals that you have a bit of an escapism practice. Maybe you struggle more with stressful, negative, real-life situations because they burst your bubble and really bring you down. Maybe you’re actually a bit of a Negative Nellie in your real life because nothing is ever the way it is in the movies you like, or maybe you’ve set yourself up with an impossible bar to reach.

At work, maybe you are organized and pleasant with everyone. You treat everyone with a certain amount of respect no matter where they are on the business hierarchy. You always clean up your dishes in the workroom and you occasionally bring in treats for your coworkers. How lovely! Now check out the alternative. Do you get annoyed when others don’t behave as you think they should? Do you in fact have an intolerance for messiness of any kind and judge people based on this? Have you developed a superiority complex with people because they aren’t as “good” as you are? How are your relationships because of it? Are they great on the surface as you play the nice guy but not very deep? Do you feel like you can’t just be yourself with all your warts and still be appreciated by everyone? Does the idea of being yourself mortify you?

Make a list. What are you good and bad at? Now, across from all the things on your list, try to write down what the strength and the weakness might be. For example, I am messy—but that also means I don’t need everything to be perfect in order to function well (some people are paralyzed by mess). Spend a moment to see what you can notice about what you deem to be your strengths and your weaknesses. Can you see that they are trails of information that lead you to a clearer picture of yourself? Can you see how what you deem to be “good” and “bad” are in fact two sides of the same coin? And that when you own them in their entirety, it can help you create balance within yourself and release the notion of “good” and “bad” altogether?

For it is easy to criticize and break down the spirit of others, but to know yourself takes maybe a lifetime. To take responsibility of one’s actions, good and bad, is something else. After all, all knowledge simply means self-knowledge.

Self-Help

We are making these efforts to dive deeply into identifying, understanding, and working on our true selves because without that knowledge and practice, we cannot grow closer to our full potential and attain our natural, essential nature. We thus cannot become more like water. How we perceive ourselves and how we direct our thoughts is key to being able to flow. My father would say it’s not what you think but how you think that’s important. The “what” will become quickly influenced when the “how” is directed in the proper direction. Take this quote by way of example. It is one of my favorites from my father:

We shall find the truth when we examine the problem. The problem is never apart from the answer; the problem is the answer.

Think about it concretely. When you look at a simple algebra problem like 3 + x = 10, you cannot possibly solve for x without the other components. The answer is within the problem. It would be crazy for us to look at that math problem and start looking in the refrigerator for an answer. Yet this is what we do all day long. In particular, we do it by blaming others for our problems. That’s not to say people don’t stand in our way sometimes, but the solution is always in our own hands. Always. We just need to be more creative about how we look for the solutions that elude us.

Always late for work? Set your alarm clock ten minutes earlier. That’s not the answer? Go to sleep earlier so you’re not too tired in the morning. It’s more serious than that? Take a look at whether or not you may be depressed. Oh, we’re getting warmer? What is the root of your depression? Do you need to go seek help? Follow the problem. Try on some solutions, but follow the problem. See what you notice. Let the problem lead you.

My father would encourage us, as we sit with our problems, “to be alert, to question, to find out, to listen, to understand, and to be open.” This is a great checklist for ourselves. Was I paying attention? Did I ask all the questions? Did I find out the answers? Was I listening? Do I understand what happened? Was I open to the whole experience? My father would caution us not to work for information but to “work for understanding,” for “it’s not how much you learn but how much you absorb in what you learn.”

Bruce Lee wrote down his thoughts and actively processed his learning all the time. He didn’t journal in the typical sense of the word, meaning he didn’t have numerous bound journals that he neatly kept, but he did track his progress, write down his ideas, goal-set, dream, hypothesize out loud. He would craft letters and essays through numerous drafts. We’ll discuss more of the ways in which my father used writing as a processing tool in chapter five. But from his own writings, we can see what was important to him, and what put him on the path to self-discovery—or, as he called it, self-help.

In one piece of writing from 1972, he noted that he had a deeply inquisitive nature and would ask himself these questions all the time as a youth:

What comes after victory?

Why do people value victory so much?

What is “glory”?

What kind of “victory” is “glorious”?

My father recalled how as a child he was a troublemaker and was greatly disapproved of by his elders. He says, “I was extremely mischievous, aggressive, hot-tempered, and fierce. Not only my opponents of more or less my age stayed out of my way, but even the adults gave in to my temper.” He goes on to say he doesn’t know why he was so truculent. Just that whenever he met someone he didn’t like, his first thought was to challenge him. But challenge him with what? “The only concrete thing that I could think of was my fists,” my father wrote. He continued, “I thought that victory meant beating down others, but I failed to realize that victory gained by way of force was not real victory.” He recounts that later, when he became a student at the University of Washington, he was guided by a tutor to help choose his courses. The tutor, upon noting my father’s inquisitive nature and his numerous questions, suggested he take some philosophy courses. The tutor told him, “Philosophy will tell you what man lives for.”

My father noted that many of his friends and family were surprised that he was studying philosophy, since all he had ever been fanatical about was martial arts. They assumed he would go into some sort of physical education once in college. But my father quickly saw the connection between philosophy and martial arts. Recall that he wrote, “Every action should have its why and wherefore … I wish to infuse the spirit of philosophy into martial arts; therefore I insisted upon studying philosophy.”

It was through the study of philosophy that he began to see the error of his former ways and to regret his previous assumptions about victory—but only because he could reflect honestly upon himself and his actions. Coming to the conclusion many years later, he realized, “Whether I like it or not, circumstances are thrust upon me and being a fighter at heart, I fight it in the beginning but soon realize what I need is not inner resistance and needless conflict, but rather, by joining forces, to readjust and make the best of it.” Joining forces with the problems and the questions led my father to the solutions he was seeking and led him to a deeper understanding of his beloved martial arts and himself.

As you investigate and stick with the problem, I encourage you to utilize the tool of journaling or writing as a way of tracking your discoveries and organizing your thoughts. Don’t just think your thoughts; write them down. Physically track what you love, what you’re curious about, your experiments, your ideas, your dreams. If you just think them and don’t truly represent them in a way that turns them into a concrete practice for you, then they may just float in on one wavelength and out on another, or exist only in a vague dream or recollection with no real plan of action.

Like when I first began running my company, I had an idea of what I was trying to accomplish, but I couldn’t express it to anyone because I hadn’t really taken the time to consider and work through what my vision, my mission, and my values were in concise, expressible terms. My employees could take directives from me and even trust me, but they were in the relative darkness about where the ship was headed because it just existed as a general thought in my own brain. This robbed all of us of some vital agency within our jobs.

Sometimes the act of funneling thoughts into physical form on paper can be a key part of self-actualizing and can give us the sense that our mental wanderings and discoveries are now being held accountable by us and will not be forgotten. The paper (or computer) can be a place to work through your process and list the questions that are pulling at you right now. It can be a work space, safety net, playground, or personal release. It can be a key to self-help.

In his work, my father set out clear guideposts along the path of discovery, and he advocated highly for self-help. Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to live in the new age section of the bookstore (though he did advocate for prescriptive reading of all kinds of books; for him “specialized reading” was “mental food”). What he means by “self-help” is that you are the only one who can help yourself. Even in asking for someone else’s help, you are helping yourself. Self-help, however you come by it—reading books, journaling, seeking a mentor, going to therapy, talking things out with trusted friends, meditating—is simply you sleuthing for your solution, looking for your discovery, learning what works or doesn’t work, understanding your strengths and weaknesses. It is a process of self-empowerment.

As he said:

I have come to discover through earnest personal experience and dedicated learning that ultimately the greatest help is self-help. There is no other help but self-help. Self-help comes in many forms: daily discoveries, honesty as we whole-heartedly do our best, indomitable dedication, and a realization that there is no end or limit because life is an ever-going process.

As we position ourselves to be curious, to look deeply at ourselves, we must be courageous in the face of our fears and ready to integrate our understanding into our experience. This state of constant independent inquiry that leads to new discoveries will be the means by which we uncover our potential and thus find our flow. Let it stand as a point of excitement and wonder that this learning, this uncovering, this process is limitless—and therefore, so is our potential.

To be certain, every day there can be a revelation or a new discovery that I can obtain. I dare not say that I have reached any state of achievement, for I am still learning, for learning is boundless!