Freedom discovers you the moment you lose concern over what impression you are making or about to make.
Bruce Lee
/phil
Freedom!
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Category Archives: Bruce Lee_md
Live the life!
The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into pattern of systems.
Bruce Lee
There are uses for systems and routines, but you have to be careful not to get stuck in them.
It is about spontaneity, living in the present and enjoying every single day with a clear mind. Routines do not necessarily destroy these ambitions, but they often make it very hard to just live and enjoy it.
/phil
Bruce Lee Week #7: On reaching goals
I consider this one to be mainly a fitness/sports motivation, but you can apply it to many other things also:
Long term consistency beats short term intensity.
Bruce Lee
This is a simple, yet important concept. Doing 10 minutes of pushups or situps every day for 30 days is much better than doing half an hour every sunday for a month. Especially when it comes to training, wether muscle or brain training, it is about consitency and repition.
Progress takes time and the longer you train something, the more profound your knowledge will be in that field. This is why you can learn a language in a year but you won’t be able to master it in that time for example. And this is why discipline is so very important.
We are all used to little boosts of motivation every now and then. Suddenly you want to get fit, you get up early, hit the gym, eath healthy, you change your whole routine. This won’t last long, I can promise it. Instead, make small changes and focus on consistency. Start small, but don’t slack off. You will improve greatly, just be patient!
/phil
Bruce Lee Week #6: Create your world
To hell with circumstances, I create opportunities.
Bruce Lee
There are a lot of things that can not be controlled. Life will put you in situations that you do not like at all. But although you can not control those situations, you can control your reactions to them.
How you react to situations and given circumstances defines what you can make out of them. You can turn a bad situation into a good opportunity. Having a flat tire? Great, you will learn how to change a tire! Your usual bus route is cancelled due to whatever reason? Awesome, time to learn a new route.
Okay, those examples are pretty mundane, but you get the point. It is about you feel and react towards what life throws at you that makes you happy or not. It is very important to realise that there is a lot out of your control and to just let it go. That’s just how it is, so don’t worry and make the best out of it.
Also, don’t wait for right moments all the time. Often, there is no right time. The right time is an imaginary moment you created in order to prolong decisions and bold actions. Create the right moment by acting!
/phil
Bruce Lee Week #5: About validation and dependency
I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.
Bruce Lee
See, in life we always seek validation. That is one reason why we love to play games. They give us a sense of validation and achievement in a micro-cosmos. It is easier and faster to achieve goals in games than it is in real life.
Becoming rich in monopoly takes some hours and feels great, while getting rich in real life takes years or decades and who knows how it feels? Leveling up your character in an MMO and equipping him well to make him mighty is an easy and well-guided and awarded task, while getting ripped and trained in real life is a long-term goal with lots of sweat and tears involved.
But it is important not to depend on the validation of others in the process. You should not train, work or do anything in order to just impress someone. If there is nothing in it for you, what’s the point in doing it? Your actions should be aligned with your beliefs and your dreams. Your ideals define who you could be, but only your actions define who you are. Act accordingly.
Thoughts shape actions, action shape habits and habits shape character. Watch your thoughts and be careful not to be too eager to please others. Think about what you want out of life and what you expect from yourself.
/phil
Bruce Lee Week #4: Do not divide
Take not thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than.
Be not for or against.
Bruce Lee
The matter of right or wrong is something very subjective. Yes, there are certain things not to be argued with, like the laws of physics. But in most cases, decisions require judgement.
The moment you decide that something is right or wrong, you make a judgement.It is right in your eyes. Based on what you know and believe in this world, you can decide. It is perfectly reasonable for other people to disagree. Maybe they have experienced other things and see the matter in a different light.
Right, wrong, good or bad, those values are no absolute factors. They are subjective and can change. They are influenced by a lot of factors and it is not only about agreeing or disagreeing with other people. Maybe your future-self disagrees with some of the things you believe in right now. Actually, that is pretty likely.
Therefore try not to judge too much. Respect and value the right to communicate one’s opinions and ideas. Listen a lot! Discuss your own ideas and the ideas of others. But be careful in your judgement and be even more careful when talking in absolutes.
/phil
Bruce Lee Week #3: About Limits
Okay, today I will cover the topic of limits. Enjoy this little story of Bruce and his close friend John Little (Taken from the great book From The Art Of Expressing The Human Body):
Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile
[Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a half minutes per mile].
So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.”
I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.”
He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.”
I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.”
So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce if I run any more,” –and we’re still running-”if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.”
He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles. Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it.
I said, you know, “Why did you say that?”
He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.
Yes, this is extreme. And yes, this is only one little example of his views on limits and personal growth.
But it is such a strong motion. Bruce Lee did not accept failure or limits. He did not accept the fact that somebody put a limit on something. He knew that limits are a mental concept and relative. And he knew from experience that he and every other person was quite able to outperform expectations.
Bruce realised that often the reason for our failures is that we just give up. We put a mental limit on our potential and just let it go. We may search for excuses, which is very easy, and just defend why we can’t do something instead of just doing it.
Well, I can only say: Don’t let the people who say it can’t be done interrupt the ones that are doing it.
I challenge you to hunt for your own little excuses! Next time you put a limit on yourself, think twice if it really is a limit or if it is just an excuse! Find those excuses and kill them! In most cases, they will resist at the beginning, but you will beat them eventually, at the latest when you’ve accomplished something which they excused you from.
Happy hunting,
/phil
Bruce Lee Week #2: Simplify, focus on the important things in life!
It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away the unessential.
Bruce Lee
Our society has taught us that more equals better. More money, more material goods, more of basically anything will increase your happiness.
That may work on a superficial level, but it won’t fulfil you, it won’t make you genuinely happy. Collecting material goods or money may occupy your mind and give you a sense of accomplishment, but it has two flaws. It will make you depend on those goods and it will always have you craving for more.
Satisfaction and happiness are mental states that have no requirements. By nature you can be happy and satisfied at any given moment. The assumption that more stuff or money will make you happy eventually will make you run a race you can not win.
It will make you chase the carrot on a stick and before you know it, you are exhausted and still as far away from your carrot than you were at the beginning.
Lee was also talking about martial arts when he talked about hacking away the unessential, but it can definitely be used as a metaphor for your life. Like Fight Club taught us: The things you own end up owning you.
Happiness comes from the inside, not from the outside. It is not dependant on circumstances, it acknowledges them. It forms them, creating chances and possibilities.
Use your time for the essentials. You have one life and a limited amount of given time. Make good use of it. And by good use I do not mean accumulate as much money or collect as many houses/cars, whatever. You can do that. Just don’t do it as a pathway to happiness, because you will find out that it is a dead end.
/phil
Bruce Lee Week #1: Get your thoughts straight!
All right, this week will feature Bruce Lee quotes only and focus on some of his views on life. Why? Because he is awesome and one of my greatest inspirations.
Hopefully you will find him as inspirational as I do, enjoy.
As you think, so shall you become.
Bruce Lee
As I wrote some time ago in the article You decide who you are, your mind is extremely powerful. It can build you up and it can break you down. In any case: Your mind leads you.
What you think of yourself and of your life determines the direction in which you are headed. Wether you think of yourself as a person with low worth and no impulse to improvement or wether you think of yourself as a rising star amongst all humans, as a motivated and high-spirited person, it will eventually become true.
The fact about self-fulfilling prophecies is that you don’t want to believe in them when it comes to negative prophecies. But it works in both ways. As long as you tell yourself that you are a weak person, you will never grow strong.
Bruce Lee is a perfect person to make this quote, although it would fit many more, of course. He had the strong belief that he was able to break records, that he was able to do better than anyone ever had done before. It was like hard-wired in his mind that he was able to reach unbelievable heights and that his potential was insane. In all his texts, speeches and even in his movies it becomes obvious:
Lee was a person that did not doubt himself in an universal way. Why he may have doubted certain ways of training or diets, he never questioned his potential and his destiny to become the greatest man in his particular branch. He knew that people could do so much more to improve themselves than they normaly did, and that was probably one of the reasons that gave him the strength not to copy that mistake.
This is especially interesting as Bruce Lee did not limit himself to movies and acting. He was a very philosophical person and his way to approach physical training was way more than just a sports thing. For Lee, training was his life. He spent countless of hours of his short life to find out the best ways of training, the best ways of fighting, the best possible ways of living in a healthy body.
All of his work would have been impossible if it were not for his urgent desire to suceed and to achieve his great goals. He may not have reached all of them, but he sure succeeded in being an incredible person in many ways.
You have to believe in yourself and you have to know what you want out of yourself. Do not think too low of yourself. After all, if you don’t respect yourself, how do you expect others to do so?
Stay positive,
/phil
Fitness motivation from the master himself
If you are talking about fighting as it is, with no rules, well then, baby, you’d better train every part of your body.
Bruce Lee
They say: Don’t skip leg day.
I say: Don’t skip any day!
Legs, Arms, Abs, Back, Core, the list goes on. Training is more than muscles, it is about mindset, coordination, strength, endurance, it has a lot of facets.
And this is not only about training for fighting, of course. It applies to any kind of training and is a good reminder of diversity in the gym (or wherever you may train)
/phil
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