✪ How to Test, Compare, and Recommend What Works, for Whom, and When: The Bruce Lee Method - #88

I help experienced independent consultants, advisors and small expert-led firms that already deliver valuable work, but whose online presence fails to show why their expertise is different and worth paying for.

In short

Everybody knows Bruce Lee as the most famous and iconic martial arts movie star.

Very few people know what he actually spent his life building, Jeet Kune Do, or JKD, which was not a new martial art in the usual sense at all.

He curated the best of many different combat arts and disciplines, going deep into boxing, fencing, wrestling, even ballroom dance, testing what actually worked, and devising a unique, flexible and dynamic combat framework meant to be somewhat the antithesis of traditional old-school martial arts. A fluid, evolving system, not a fixed, tightly structured and rigidly disciplined one. In 1993 I accidentally discovered his philosophy and practice, thanks to Sifu Alessandro Colonnese, and trained with him for more than ten years, becoming honorary president of the small Jun Fan Gung-Fu Academy in the Primavalle district of Rome.

What I have come to realize today is that the lack of an organic vision, which made the martial arts of the 60s and 70s compete so harshly against each other, is the same thing independent writers and experts online are missing now. Not more opinions, ideas, or techniques. More people willing to become meta-curators, the Bruce Lee of their field, who look at the whole territory and tell you honestly what’s worth trusting, when to use it, and how to combine it with the rest.

1. Bruce Lee Was a Curator Before Anyone Used the Word

2. No Way Is the Way: A Method Built Not to Be One

3. Every Field Runs Like Pre-Lee Martial Arts

4. Your Field Doesn’t Need More Ideas. It Needs Meta-Curators

5. How to Actually Do This: Wise Winnowing

6. Paradata

When I was six years old I already had a real sword in my hand. In the underground fencing hall of the Stadio Flaminio in Rome, I was trained, day in, day out, by some of the best masters of the time: Ruggero, LoMele, Passariello.

Later came Tae Kwon Do, Judo, Karate, kung fu, one traditional system after another, each with its own rigid curriculum. Then, from the late 90s to the mid-2000s, Jeet Kune Do found me, more than the other way around, and I got so pulled in over the following years that I ended up honorary president of a small JKD-inspired academy in Rome, flying in men who had trained directly with Bruce Lee and inviting them to teach us everything they’d learned from him.

So I’ve spent real years inside this, not as a fan of the movies (I never much cared for all that acrobatic fake theater), but as a practitioner. And thanks to my own master, I slowly learned the part about Bruce almost nobody knows: what he actually spent his life doing, and for what purpose.

The essence of it is this. Bruce Lee went to Wing Chun first, under Ip Man, and that gave him his base: fast punches, tight footwork, a centerline sense of where power comes from. But then he kept going. He taught himself boxing by watching fight footage over and over, studying footwork and head movement the way you’d study a language, no gym, no trainer, just repetition and attention. He read deeply into Olympic fencing and pulled out the stop-hit, the move where you attack an opponent’s strike while it’s still forming instead of waiting for it to land, he cites this directly in his own writing.

He picked up savate the same self-taught way, from books and articles. He took what he needed from Ju-Jitsu for close range, from Tai-chi-chuan for how power actually moves through a body. And well before any of that, back in 1958, when he was still a teenager, Bruce Lee won the Hong Kong Crown Colony Cha-Cha Championship. He’d memorized over a hundred dance steps through the same obsessive repetition he later put into fighting. People who’ve studied his footwork closely, including his own biographer, connect it straight back to that: the rhythm, the balance, the ability to shift tempo mid-fight, that’s a dancer’s instinct as much as a fighter’s.

So the man everybody knows as an actor was, underneath that, someone who went out and personally tested boxing, fencing, wrestling, dance, and more, kept what worked, and never treated any single one of those combat arts as his one true credo. He tapped into all of them, but sold himself to none. He extracted, distilled, and refined the very best from each and every one of those disciplines.

He curated a new perspective. He saw past the individual viewpoints, schools, and well-guarded traditions. Without even knowing it, Bruce Lee became a meta-curator of combat arts, distilling and bringing together, organically, the very best from dozens of different disciplines.

Each of those individual arts Bruce Lee curated, distilled, and mashed up organically wasn’t raw material sitting around waiting for someone to notice it. Each martial art and combat discipline was already a curated body of work.

Boxing is generations of fighters testing punches and footwork in a ring and keeping only what survived. Fencing is centuries of duelists refining what works with a blade and a strict sense of distance. Kung fu, in each of its regional lineages, is its own act of curation, worked out inside one culture, one school, one set of constraints, over a very long time.

So Bruce Lee wasn’t curating raw techniques or combat moves. He was curating the most functional and efficient parts of what specialized combat arts curators, the masters of each martial art school, had already worked out.

When he went to boxing, he wasn’t inventing footwork, he was taking footwork that generations of boxers had already tested and kept. Same with fencing, same with everything else. That makes him what I’d call a combat meta-curator: not someone picking among individual techniques, but someone picking among the best of what other curators, the arts themselves, had already worked out. A curator of curators, in the exact sense I already use that phrase in my writing on meta-curation.

Here’s one thing you may miss if you only know Bruce Lee from the outside. Bruce Lee didn’t take everything he’d learned and weld it into a new fixed style with its own dogma, its own “this is the one true way,” the way every martial art before his had done. Here’s what he said in his own words:

That’s not a slogan for marketing. That was the actual design principle of his combat philosophy.

Jeet Kune Do wasn’t built to be a finished thing, a closed, rigid, unchangeable fighting system. It was built to be questioned, tested, and adjusted differently for whoever was using it and whatever situation they were in.

Unfortunately, and I witnessed this firsthand, after Lee died, some of the schools that carried his name did to Jeet Kune Do exactly what he’d spent his life refusing to do to every combat art before it. They fixed it. They turned “absorb what is useful” into a closed curriculum with its own orthodoxy, taught as if it were finished.

I don’t think that’s what Lee wanted, and there are practitioners today, closer to his actual intent, who keep evolving it instead of preserving it untouched, a split documented on Wikipedia between Jun Fan JKD, preserved as taught, and JKD Concepts, which keeps evolving.

But this fact alone shows you how strong the pull toward rigidity, closure, and ownership really is. Even a framework built specifically to resist becoming dogma can get turned into one, the moment the person who built it isn’t there anymore to keep questioning it.

Before Lee, martial arts didn’t talk to each other. Kung Fu practitioners in one part of China had no real way to study fencing in France or boxing in the American south, and even inside Kung Fu, the different schools mostly guarded their own forms against the school next door. Each one insisted its own approach was correct, its own recipe the most effective and durable. My Kung Fu beats your Karate. My style, my technique, my lineage, against everyone else’s.

Cut to the digital world, online publishing, and AI.

I look at the field of independent experts and consultants online right now, and I see the same thing. Every author, every consultant, every advisor has their own framework, their own “here’s the right way to do this,” pitched as if it’s the whole answer and everyone else’s approach is a lesser version of it.

Nobody today is short on ideas. If anything there are too many, competing and overlapping, each one presented as a standalone, self-sufficient perspective, disconnected from its own history and from its critics.

What was missing in the combat arts world before Bruce Lee wasn’t a new style. There were already dozens.

What was missing was someone willing to stand outside all of them, look at the whole territory at once, and actually go test, compare, and recommend: this works here, that doesn’t, this piece from an unrelated art solves a problem your style has never solved.

Back in this article I wrote that the new influencer is not a writer, it’s a meta-curator:

More specifically:

• Level 1 curators find and share good things.

• Level 2, the meta-curators, evaluate the Level 1 curators themselves and tell you who’s actually worth trusting.

Every combat art school before Bruce Lee was a Level 1 curator, its own closed act of curation, defended against the school next door. Bruce Lee is one of the clearest Level 2 examples I know of, a meta-curator before this word even existed, someone who stood above all those individual disciplines and told fighters honestly which ones held up and which didn’t.

I think that’s exactly what’s missing in my own field, and probably yours.

Frankly, I don’t know if we really need another bunch of new ideas, opinions, and frameworks added to the pile. What I feel is needed are trustable meta-curators, the Bruce Lees of your field: people who look across all the different approaches, techniques, and models that are already out there, test them, and tell you honestly what’s old, what’s actually new, where an idea originally came from, and which one fits your specific situation rather than which one the person selling it wants you to believe fits everyone.

More people doing that work, for whatever their field is, would matter more than another hundred new frameworks published this year.

When I wrote:

I basically said the same thing:

too many people each insisting their way is the way, not enough people willing to sort through all of it honestly.

There’s also a reason this matters more right now than it used to.

A few months back I named cross-domain connection-making as one of five capacities that AI genuinely cannot replicate, because it requires lived, embodied experience in more than one field at once, not just training data that happens to contain both topics separately.

Bruce Lee connecting boxing footwork, fencing stop-interception and the best from many different traditional combat arts, is exactly that capacity.

So here’s a fair test for whether you’re doing this work yourself: can you point to a connection you’ve made that no model could have made for you, because it never lived inside both fields the way you have?

Here’s a practical way to start doing what Bruce Lee did so well: unknowingly building his enormous authority by curating the best from other combat masters and schools: the Wise Winnowing Method.

I imagine you already see this in your own field: too many people insisting their one framework is the answer, not enough people willing to look at the whole territory, put order to it, and guide others toward a choice.

But let me ask you: if I read your last three articles right now, would I see one more voice insisting your way is the way, or is there any sign that you’ve actually gone and looked across what’s out there and can tell someone what fits them?

Checking how credible and authoritative you actually look to the people who might hire, buy from, or ask for your advice is exactly what I do. I study your online presence as a true potential prospect would, I observe and video-record what I see on your own channel, and I send you my observations. Then I meet you online and we go together through what is not working and what I would do to improve it.

Curious? Find out more

Bruce Lee didn’t win by knowing one more technique. He won by testing enough of everyone else’s to know, and say plainly, which one to trust and when.

The most valuable person in a crowded field is never the one with another good idea. It’s the one who has tested enough of what already exists to tell you which one is actually right for you.

• The Collector, “7 Fighting Disciplines That Influenced Bruce Lee and Jeet Kune Do”, Wikipedia, “Jeet Kune Do”

• Bruce Thomas’s biography: Dangerous Minds, “Bruce Lee: the 1958 Hong Kong cha-cha champion”

• “Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, add what is specifically your own”: Wikiquote, “Bruce Lee”, Black Belt Magazine, “Bruce Lee Philosophies: Absorb What Is Useful”.

• Wikipedia, “Jeet Kune Do”

• TRUST-able #64, “The New Influencer Is a Meta-Curator”

• TRUST-able #51, “When Everyone Is a Guru... Curators Are Kings”

• TRUST-able #65, “The Wise Winnowing Method”

• TRUST-able #70, “What AI Cannot Fake”

Intent/Why: I trained seriously in many combat arts and then spent years inside Jeet Kune Do, to the point of becoming president of a small JKD-inspired academy in Rome and hosting direct students of Bruce Lee to teach there. For a long time I kept that part of my life separate from the work I do now. This issue exists because I finally noticed that Lee’s method and the way authority actually forms in a field are the same method, and I have not seen anyone else say so.

I also wanted to capture and share the lesser-known story of Bruce Lee, because, having lived through it myself, I can now see how his contribution to the world of combat arts is a real example and inspiration for what a meta-curator today should be. Bruce refused to build one more closed fighting style. Instead, he tested across styles and schools, even in adjacent, apparently disconnected fields, and kept it open to change, which is what independent experts are missing now: not more ideas but more people willing to survey their whole territory honestly.

Process: This piece sat in my drafts folder for months under a different title, Jeet Yi Do, and even though it was already about Bruce Lee, it told a different story. It never felt mature enough to publish. Something about it was off, and I couldn’t quite say what. I don’t fully remember how I first arrived at it, probably looking for the intersection between Lee’s combat philosophy and the idea of intercepting an opponent’s move applied to publishing and authority. But what came back from that first AI originated brief drifted into a claim I had never actually made. Even though it was very smart-sounding and slick, it didn’t survive my own severe scrutiny.

It wasn’t only the polish, which was already more than I’d ever use myself. The substance either wasn’t there, or I hadn’t understood it well enough myself to grasp it.

So while Claude, who had written that original draft, was strongly pushing for publishing it, I resisted up until the other day, when, at AI renewed suggestion to let it out I stopped and re-questioned the whole thing. I explained to Claude my doubts and why I didn’t think the logic held, and why it didn’t match what I actually believed. Then I re-explained, in my own words, what I think is genuinely relevant about Bruce Lee and what he did to combat arts, for any expert, consultant, or advisor who writes and publishes online. I asked Claude to throw the original draft away rather than patch it, I wanted the piece rebuilt around my actual ideas, not the old one repaired. What came back the second time was much closer to what I wanted, and from there I took it the way I always do, as a canvas. I went through it from the title and subtitle on, rewriting most of it start to finish. That’s how I arrived at what you’re reading now.

Times:

• Topic identification, stats analysis, AI briefing: 1 hr

• Research: 0.5 hrs

• Drafting and Manual Re-writing: 3.5 hrs

• Revisions and corrections (found a faster way): 0.25 hrs

• Formatting and links: 1 hr

• Paradata: 0.5 hrs

• Cover design: 1 hr

• Testing: 0.25 hrs

• Total apx. time: 8 hrs

Tools:

• Claude Sonnet 5 - for topic and data analysis - outline and content drafting

• ChatGPT 5.6 - for cover image execution

• The Curator - personal knowledge base of all TRUSTable articles for synthesis / insights into all the ideas and concepts published so far

• StackContacts - vital performance statistics of this Substack publication

Cover Image: Bruce Lee alongside masters of other combat arts: wrestling, boxing, fencing, muay thai, silat, karate. Image and concept by Robin Good executed by ChatGPT Image 2

Follow a path with a heart.

From Koh Samui (TH)
Robin Good