Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,40

and criticize you no matter what you do. You will never know your true potential until you break the unfair judgements you place on yourself. Don’t allow other people’s opinions and expectations to run or ruin your life.

New belief: It’s not your job to like, love, or respect me. It’s mine.

LIE NO. 7: GENIUS IS BORN

Bruce Lee is known today as a film star, philosopher, and one of the most accomplished martial arts fighters in the history of the sport. And yet, given his background, you wouldn’t have pegged him as a future icon if you were under the assumption that genius is born.

Lee’s family moved from San Francisco to Hong Kong shortly after he was born.29 Not long after they arrived, Hong Kong was occupied by Japan, making it a politically and socially tumultuous place to grow up. As a young man, Lee was faced with the difficulty of being the ultimate outsider. He was not purely Chinese, so the students in his classes made fun of him. He also wasn’t British like other kids in his private school, so he was frequently taunted for being “oriental.” The feeling of tension was ever-present for him—so he turned to fighting to battle his way through.30 Fighting began to define him. His grades were low, and he fought so often in school that he transferred to a different primary school.

When Lee was 13, he met his teacher Yip Man, who taught him Wing Chun. He was accepted into this famous teacher’s school and began to learn this style of Kung Fu. Not unlike the rest of his education, he was still taunted by the Chinese children who felt he was not enough like them to be “allowed” to learn the technique. He constantly had to prove himself and his abilities, and his fighting spilled over into the streets. This internal tension, coupled with Hong Kong’s slide into gang violence, led to Lee fighting far more often than learning. He developed a reputation for being street-tough through his willingness and propensity for battle.

After one particularly bad street fight, a high-ranking police officer approached Lee’s parents and told them their son would be arrested. The boy he had beat up the night before was the son of this police officer. Lee’s father quickly arranged for Lee to go back to America; after all, he still had citizenship. So, off Lee went with $100 in his pocket. “Like most Chinese kids who had just gotten off the boat, my first job was washing and bussing dishes,”31 said Lee in a later interview. He worked to support himself with odd jobs and eventually started teaching martial arts.

Lee wasn’t just talented—he was also willing to teach other people, and he accepted everyone who came to him as a student, regardless of their race or background. This soon ruffled the feathers of the Chinese community in Oakland, who felt that these techniques should not be taught to anyone who wasn’t Chinese. Eventually, he was forced to defend his right to teach. The Chinese traditionalists challenged him to a fight, saying that if he won, he could keep his school. But if he lost, he would be forced to shut it down and stop teaching to people outside of their ethnic group.

Lee’s style was different from any one form of martial arts. When he was still living in Hong Kong, he took dancing lessons, and in 1957 he was so good he won the cha-cha championship. He added the movements he learned in dance to his fighting techniques. Where other fighters took a mostly solitary stance with their feet, he kept his moving constantly, which fueled his ability to adapt to his opponent’s moves. Lee did this with everything he learned later in life. Eventually, his style incorporated not only Wing Chun, but boxing, fencing, and dancing.

It was a major turning point—the old vanguard against the new. Lee’s wife Linda was eight months pregnant at the time, and she remembers the scene vividly, almost comically. She recalls it took three minutes for Lee to get his opponent down to the ground; before this take-down, the opponent had run around the room, trying to get away from Lee.

After the fight, Linda found Lee with his head in his hands, despite his victory. He told her that his training didn’t prepare him for this kind of a battle. As she describes it, this was the beginning of the evolution to his own way of martial arts.

After this battle, Lee no