Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.
Bruce Lee
The meaning of the quote
In 1970, Bruce Lee loaded a 125-pound barbell onto his shoulders and bent forward without warming up. Something in his lower back gave way.
Doctors found a damaged nerve at the base of his spine. They ordered total bed rest and told him he would probably never kick again. Money got tight, and a man who trained every day couldn’t train at all.
Lee did what he could do lying down. For 6 months he read and filled notebooks with ideas about fighting, the body and how to live. Those pages later became the book Tao of Jeet Kune Do.
Lee didn’t get to pick his lesson that year. Life handed him one, and he chose to study it.
Most of us think learning happens in a classroom, with a teacher at the front and a test at the end. The quote moves the classroom into your everyday life. Every job, argument, failure and boring afternoon carries a lesson, and you’re sitting in that lesson whether you signed up for it or not.
The second half of the quote says you never graduate, because you never reach a point where you know enough to stop paying attention.
A bad grade on a test you studied hard for can feel like a verdict on how smart you are. Read it as a lesson instead. Maybe rereading your notes didn’t stick, or the 1 a.m. cramming cost you more sleep than it gave you in marks.
The quote comes from the book Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living, a collection of Lee’s personal writings edited by John Little and published in 2000. In another of his notes, Lee wrote:
“Learning is a constant process of discovery and never a concluding one.”
Action steps
A teacher is only useful if you’re paying attention. These 2 habits help you notice the lessons life is already giving you.
- Write down one lesson a day.
Before bed, finish the sentence “Today taught me…” in a notebook or on your phone. One line is enough. Lee filled whole notebooks this way. - Ask a better question when things go wrong.
Swap “Why me?” for “What is this teaching me?” Then pick one small change to make next time, and go make it.
About the author
In April 1959, an 18-year-old Bruce Lee boarded a steamship in Hong Kong bound for San Francisco with $100 in his pocket. His parents had sent him away to keep him out of street fights and out of trouble with the police.
Fighting wasn’t his only talent. A year earlier he had won the Hong Kong cha-cha championship, and on the ship he earned extra money teaching dance to first-class passengers.
In Seattle, Lee waited tables at Ruby Chow‘s Chinese restaurant and slept in a room upstairs. He went to school by day, worked by night and taught his first kung fu students in the alley behind the restaurant.
He later moved to Los Angeles and landed the role of Kato, the sidekick in the TV series The Green Hornet. In 1970 he hurt his back, and for a while it looked like his career was over.
A year after doctors told him he’d never kick again, Lee was in a small town in Thailand shooting fight scenes for the film The Big Boss. It broke box-office records in Hong Kong and made him a star across Asia.
Hollywood still wasn’t convinced. The lead in the TV series Kung Fu went to David Carradine, because studio bosses doubted American viewers would accept an Asian star.
Warner Bros. finally gave him the lead in the film Enter the Dragon. It became a worldwide hit.
Lee never saw it. He died on July 20, 1973, at the age of 32, just 6 days before the film came out.
Lee kept treating his setbacks as lessons and kept filling notebooks with what he learned. John Little later gathered those notes into Striking Thoughts, where you can find this quote alongside more than 800 of Lee’s thoughts on everyday life.
Resources
- Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Book)
- Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Book)
- #88 Artist of Life (Podcast)
- Bruce Lee’s Daughter Shares Her Father’s Philosophy of Learning (Article)
- Bruce Lee in Seattle (Article)
- Bruce Lee (Wikipedia)
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