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Here’s the truth: Creating the life you want can be scary. But you know what’s scarier? Regret. One day we will take our final breaths and not one of other people’s opinions or your fears will matter. What will matter is how we lived. Don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from. People will doubt you 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 longer tried to fit his knowledge and teachings into one box and discarded most of his original training. He openly took influences from areas of fighting outside of Wing Chun and Kung Fu, using them to form a philosophy of martial arts. In a later interview, he said, “I do not believe in styles anymore. I do not believe there is such a thing as the Chinese way of fighting, Japanese way of fighting.”³² Instead, Lee’s approach focused on fighting as a way of ultimate self-expression. “When people come to me to learn, they’re not coming to me to learn to defend themselves. They want to learn to express themselves through movement, anger, or determination.” He believed that the individual is more important than any style or system.
No one remembers Lee for his academic endeavors. Lee is remembered for his tenacity, his ability to defeat his opponents, his philosophy, and for the way he managed to break out of the box of orthodox thinking and bring different styles of fighting together to create an entirely new philosophy. So
was he a natural genius, someone born to achieve outsize physical, mental, and philosophical feats?
In The Talent Code, author Daniel Coyle delves into whether talent is innate or whether it can be developed. He argues “greatness isn’t born, it’s grown.” Through deep practice, ignition, and master coaching, anyone can develop a talent so deep that it looks like genius.³³
Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon spoke at our annual conference about her father’s approach to memory and learning. She said that, by the time Lee was a film star and notable teacher, he had already achieved thousands upon thousands of hours of deep practice, at least in part because of his early days in fighting on the streets. Later in life, Lee didn’t master the famous one-inch punch in a day. That alone took years of hard repetition and practice. Lee continued to train and condition himself even with a back injury—it was a daily commitment. Ignition is the motivation, the fuel to do what you do. It seems Lee’s initial fuel was the tension he felt as a Chinese American in a place that didn’t accept him as either. Later, his ignition seems to have been his drive for ultimate self-expression. And finally, Lee had training from a master teacher, Yip Man, who himself was trained by several master teachers from the time he was a child. When Lee became his student, he had been teaching Kung Fu for decades.
Lee’s talent was born of a confluence of experiences and circumstances that served him well, although they may have defeated someone else. How many of us would look at a young child with a propensity for fighting and poor grades and predict that he would become a master teacher and philosopher?