Who was Bruce Lee, really? He was probably many things, but above all he was one of the greatest entrepreneurs in history, a legend and a visionary who changed thousands of years of martial arts culture and whose teachings will last forever.
Bruce Lee brought part of Eastern culture to the West, and his passion led him to take on an ancient empire to show that not everything in martial arts had already been invented. What’s more, even the way fighting itself was understood could be wrong. He was the Steve Jobs of martial arts, a perfectionist who, it is said, could spend days shooting different takes of a 10-second film sequence until he was satisfied with the result.
(Read: 11 Steve Jobs quotes that will go down in history)
Lee had to face one of the challenges the Chinese community set him. He had to fight a great Chinese fighter. If he lost, he would have to stop teaching his martial art to the world.
Although in the film Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story the fight seemed evenly matched, in the real fight, according to those who were there, the Chinese fighter spent the whole time running away while Bruce Lee chased him around the room until he caught him and made him give up.
It was said that Bruce Lee would probably never walk again and could no longer practice martial arts because of a serious injury, but he showed how mental self-control and willpower can overcome even a medical diagnosis. Not only did he return to martial arts, he became an even better fighter. Here are some of his best thoughts, sayings and ideas about life, which can certainly be applied to any field beyond martial arts, including business and the entrepreneurial mindset, because even starting a business is a constant fight.
See also: Just when it seemed everything had been invented… along came Pinterest
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Bruce Lee used to say that many people focus so much on the importance of getting a good result that they forget to give their best to bring that result about.
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Choose to be positive: you are the owner of your attitude, and optimism is what leads you to success.
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Just as one of Warren Buffett’s pieces of advice is to buy when everyone is selling and sell when everyone is buying, Lee said that in the middle of chaos, everyone looks for complicated ways out. That is when you should act with simplicity.
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Great advice, no doubt. Make one move a day: take one step every day towards your goals. That is basically what the Seinfeld strategy was about.
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You must be ready, but not tense. You must be flexible, aware of the situation at all times, alert and prepared for whatever may come. Nothing should ever take you by surprise. You should already have worked out that it could happen.
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There are no completely wrong thoughts, and no completely right ones. Take the best from every thought and every person, and use it.
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The mind must always be open to learning new things. A closed mind is a very limited mind.
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Life is movement, so people who stagnate die. Everything changes, everything moves quickly, so we must keep moving all the time, whether we’re talking about our career or our business.
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The mind is our best ally or our worst enemy, depending on what you feed it and what you plant in it.
There was a phrase Bruce Lee often used. He said he couldn’t understand why people liked to make life so complicated when “simplicity is the shortest path between two points”.
(Read: 8 beliefs of successful people)
See also: 5 lessons for success in your career and business that you should start following now
Featured image: HK Arun, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
