Bruce Lee: Adapt

Why your ambitions needs you to be water.

“The inability to adapt brings destruction.”
– Bruce Lee

In attempting to explain why Bruce Lee won, we have to acknowledge how Bruce Lee changed.

• When his career in Hollywood stalled, he took a project in Hong Kong to pay the bills. When it did well and they offered him a bigger contract, he stayed.

• His martial arts evolved after every single fight because Jeet Kune Do had one philosophy above all else: “do whatever is necessary to win.”¹

• When his technique failed to translate on-screen, he adapted it again – incorporating boxing, karate kicks, and weaponry. A movie needed something different than a real fight, and he was okay with that.

Bruce was decisively practical. And that practically awarded him a “continuity in movement” few ever experience.

His life had momentum not because everything went his way (it very much did not!), but because he saw every roadblock as a call to change something about himself and his approach.

He was water.

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

But when and what should you adapt?

The biggest hurdle I faced when deciding how to close our Bruce Lee series was the application piece. Just saying you should be more adaptable is about as useful as a broken can opener. What does that even mean?

The answer is wildly contextual. However, I do think Lee’s life offers guidelines we can at least use directionally.

1. Adaptability is the child of awareness. You have to know what is really going on around you before you can take a right step.

2. Awareness is signal-watching: How can I iterate on what I have seen work for others up close? How can I double down on what's working for me now?

3. Adaptability is a mix of pull and push actions. As a general rule, you want to pull back (aka defer) when it opens up an opportunity you might otherwise miss (even if it seems smaller than you would like), then push when the result of your pushing will lead to greater rewards for everyone involved.²

4. Adaptability requires movement. By not moving, you're either expecting the situation to change around you or confirming that things are satisfactory. If neither of those are true, do something.

The tragic irony is that Bruce Lee’s death was, to some degree, due to his inability (or refusal) to adapt.

Lee likely died of a heat stroke. Two months before his death, he'd suffered his first. He would have died that day if not for the public nature of the incident. Afterward, he made no changes. He worked himself to the bone in the sweltering Hong Kong heat. He lost weight and sleep. He even (insert foreshadowing) had the sweat glands in his armpits removed so that he would look less wet on screen.

On July 20, 1973, when his body overheated in the privacy of his mistress’s apartment, he laid down and never woke up.

Adaption is required not only for your success but also for your survival. Flexibility is its own type of strength.

1. All quotes are taken from Bruce Lee: A Life by Matthew Polly.

2. Bruce Lee pulled back on salary and script requests to land roles (opportunity) but pushed, inside those roles, on the fight choreography, marketing decisions, and casting — because those ultimately led to a better product and payday for everyone.