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

Choose happiness! [image]

choicesEvery choice you make affects your life way more than circumstances do. Life can not feel good as long as you choose to actively ignore it’s perks.

Choose happiness every day and look on the bright side of life!

/phil

 

Live to the fullest!

See, the problem with doing things to prolong your life is that all the extra years come at the end, when you’re old.

Live your live to the fullest! Enjoy the perks of life now and do not constantly worry about the future. Living long is not worth anything as long as you merely exist. Living is only worth anything as long as you truly live.

Don’t waste your time preparing for growing old securely. Live!

/phil

You may get wounded along the journey

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

Ernest Hemingway

 

Sometimes life takes its toll on you, but do not worry. Keep going, keep going strong and keep smiling!

/phil

Are you sure?

Our vision is more obstructed by what we think we know than by our lack of knowledge.

Kristen Stendahl

There are a lot of things we are sure about, things we won’t discuss because we just know them. But we have to be careful about those things. It is rare that anything is easily classified right or wrong and one should always be flexible and open to change.

/phil

Be good

Whatever you are, be a good one.

Abraham Lincoln

/phil

Credit where credit is due

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

/phil

Nature is against idleness

It is not necessary for a man to be actively bad in order to make a failure in life; simple inaction will accomplish it. Nature has everywhere written her protest against idleness; everything which ceases to struggle toward an ideal, the constant effort to get higher and further, which develops manhood and character.

James Terry White

/phil

It’s steep up the hill

Every worthy act is difficult. Ascent is always difficult. Descent is easy and often slippery.

Mahatma Gandhi

/phil