To be the best is to sacrifice other seemingly meaningful pursuits. 20-something year olds, often college graduates, falter when it comes time to bid farewell to the proverbial sacrificial lamb. My lambs continue to wonder why my knife has been frozen midair for the last 8 months.
Maybe that's why role models like Bruce Lee particularly fascinate me. Lee's Spartan lifestyle and extreme dedication to filmmaking led his wife to quip, often, that she wished she had married a more "well-rounded" individual. (Seth Godin says in The Dip that the worst thing school taught us was to be well-rounded; this strategy flops in life). Bruce would agree; his typical week consisted of 6 days of training; four hours per day. Nevermind the concurrent movie shooting and production.
Results? The fruits of his efforts still resonate even decades after he has left us. Fans, imitators and critics will agree that:
Bruce Lee > Jackie Chan
Bruce Lee > Jet Li
Bruce Lee > Chuck Norris
1 comment:
I like what you're thinking about, the concept of 'commitment'. Or, a stronger formulation, 'faith'. Your story of the sacrificial lamb is highly revealing -- since a sacrifice is always to God, an infinitely higher being, the highest act of faith possible. (So that Abraham was asked by God to sacrifice his own son in order to demonstrate faith.) And somewhat incompatible with your second story of Bruce Lee, which sounds more like mere "dedication".
Faith is stronger than dedication since it is possible to be dedicated in ignorance, but it's impossible to be faithful without knowing that one has faith against all conceivable evidence -- and I don't mean 'self-confidence'. So Christianity, in being founded upon faith (and people don't realize how radical this is, since most religions are founded upon power or evidence -- including virtuality all forms of Christianity today!), attempts to found a religion upon the original act rather than on dogma or brainwashing -- the original, impossible leap away from everything that seems solid and real in the world. One is never quite sure what it is exactly one has faith in, so faith proper has no object -- or, the object (God) is merely a placeholder for something absolutely not of this world. Obsession and dedication both depend on an object, as does being 'well rounded' -- really, a state of being distracted by all the 'real' things in the world.
The water example is interesting, I suppose the point is that water always flows downwards -- towards the center of the earth. Water would comprehend the nature of the earth, and not the things around it. But what it encounters are 'earthly' obstacles, apparently real things, which it does its best to ignore in an attempt to at least point towards this faith -- if not arrive at its destination.
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