Bruce Lee’s Top 7 Fundamentals for Getting Your Life in Shape

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last 30 years I’m pretty sure you know who Bruce Lee was.

If you have, then you may be interested to know that Lee was a very famous martial artist and actor who sparked the first big interest of Chinese martial arts in the West in the 60’s and 70’s.

But besides being an awesome fighter and iconic figure Lee also had some very useful things to say about life.

Here are 7 of my favourite fundamentals from Bruce Lee.

1. What are you really thinking about today?

“As you think, so shall you become.”

Perhaps the most basic statement of how we work. Think about what you are thinking today. What do those thoughts say about you? About your life? And how well do they really match your plans for your life and your image of yourself?

It’s easy to forget about this simple statement in everyday life. It’s easy to be quite incongruent with what you think on an ordinary day compared to how you view yourself and your goals. A simple external reminder such as a post-it with this quote can be helpful to keep you and your thoughts on the right track. An brilliant and beautiful expansion on this thought can be found in James Allen’s As a man thinketh (that can be downloaded for free here).

2. Simplify.

“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”

If you want to improve your life then it’s tempting to want to add more. One problem with this may be that you don’t really have the time or energy to do more though. And so your efforts to improve become short-lived.

Adding more and more just creates more stress and anxiety. Removing clutter and activities, tasks and thoughts that are not so important frees up time and energy for you to do more of what you really want to do. And as the clutter in your outer world decreases the clutter in your inner world also has a tendency to decrease. This has the added benefit of making it easier to actually enjoy whatever you are doing even more while you are doing it.

Adding more thoughts and thinking things over for the 111:th time may create a sense of security. It’s also a good way to procrastinate and to avoid taking that leap you know you should take. And the more you think, the harder it gets to act. Perhaps because you want to keep that comforting sense of security and avoid the risk of wrecking that feeling.

Thinking has its place. It can help you plan a somewhat realistic route to your goal and help you avoid future pitfalls. Overthinking is however just a habit that will help you waste a lot of time. It’s more useful to replace that habit with the habit of just doing it.

3. Learn about yourself in interactions.

“To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.”

The one person that is the hardest to get to really know may be yourself. Studying yourself while you are alone may result in some insights. But it’s also likely to produce a lot of made up thought loops and doubts in your mind. A good way to really learn more about yourself is study yourself in interactions with other people. How people react and act in these interaction can over time teach you a lot. And what you think and how you react can perhaps teach you even more.

What you see, feel and hear in other people may be a reflection of you. The things you learn by thinking this way may not always be pleasant, but they can be enlightening. They help you to see yourself and also how you may be fooling yourself. And these powerful insights can be very valuable for your personal growth. So, in interactions with others, try asking yourself: what is reflected?

4. Do not divide.

“Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.”

This is a very useful and powerful thought. It is also one that obviously is hard to live by. Why? I believe it’s because the ego loves to divide and find ways to “add more” to itself. It want’s to feel better than someone else. Or more clever. Or prettier. Or cooler. Or wiser.

How can you overcome this way of thinking and feeling?

To me it seems to boil down to not identifying so much with your thoughts or feelings. That doesn’t mean that you stop thinking or feeling. It just means that you realize – and remember in your everyday life – that the thoughts and emotions are just things flowing through you.

You are not them though.

You are the consciousness observing them.

When you realize and remember this it enables you to control the thoughts and feelings instead of the other way around. It also enables you to not take your thoughts too seriously and actually laugh at them or ignore them when you feel that your ego is acting out. When you are not being so identified these things you become more inclined to include things, thoughts and people instead of excluding them. This creates a lot of inner and outer freedom and stillness. Instead of fear, a need to divide your world and a search for conflicts.

To learn more about this I would recommend Eckhart Tolle’s books and signing up for the 10 free and excellent webcasts - available both in video and audio form – that he’s doing with Oprah right now.

5. Avoid a dependency on validation from others.

“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”

“Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.”

The ego wants to add because it thinks it’s not enough. One way of doing that is by craving validation from others. We want to feel smart, pretty, successful and so on. And the validation makes you feel good for a while. But soon you need a new fix.

And the problem with being dependent on validation from other people is that you let other people control how you feel. This creates a rollercoaster of emotion in your life.

To find more emotional stability and to take control of how you feel you need to get your validation from to a more consistent source. Yourself. You can replace the expectations and validation of others by setting your own expectations and by validating yourself.

And so you validate yourself by thinking about how awesome you are. You don’t sell yourself short. You appreciate how far you have come and the positive things you have done. You appreciate your own value in the world. You set goals and you achieve those goals. This builds confidence in yourself and in your abilities. These things will help you to build a habit of inner validation.

Now, showing off. Why do we do that? To get validation from others. However, this need for validation often shines through and that is why a thing like bragging seldom works. Instead of seeing the cool and successful person you are trying to project people just see the insecure and needy person looking for validation. And your bragging falls flat.

6. Be proactive.

“To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.”

It’s easy to get locked into a reactive mindset. You just follow along with whatever is happening. You do what the people around you do. You react to whatever is going on.

And so you get lost in your circumstances. This way of thinking doesn’t feel too good. You tend to feel powerless and like you are just drifting along.

A more useful and pleasurable way of living is to be proactive. As Bruce says: to create opportunities despite the circumstances around you. This feels better and provides better results. But on the other hand it’s also more difficult. It’s easier to just drift along in the reactive stream of life. And if you want to be proactive then you may have to take the lead quite often. And that can be scary.

Still, living proactively is so much more rewarding and exciting.

7. Be you.

“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”

Just being yourself is a hard thing to do. You may do it sometimes. And other times you may forget or fall back into old thought patterns. Or you may imitate someone else.

And that comes through too. And it may work.

But I believe that being the real you will work better. Because there the genuine you is shining through. Without incongruency, mixed messages or perhaps a sort of phoniness. It’s you to 100%. It’s you with not only your words but you with your voice tonality and body language – which some say is over 90% of communication - on the same wavelength as your words. It’s you coming through on all channels of communication.

So I’m not saying: “yeah man, you should just be yourself because it’s the right thing to do etc.” I’m saying that I think being your authentic self – the one where you do little dividing, the one that needs little validation from others, the one where your ego is not running the show and trying to get something from someone – will give you better results and more satisfaction in your day to day life because you are in alignment with yourself. And because people really like genuine and people really like authenticity.

Image by SabTomie.

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CNN.com readers holding on to big SUVs

(CNN) -- iReporter James Holler is the first to admit that he drives a gas-guzzler -- in fact, he has two of them.

Kim Davis says she gets tired of the glares she gets from Prius owners.

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The Houston, Texas, businessman spends about $75 a week to fill up his 2004 Ford Expedition and another $80 on premium gas for his 2001 Jaguar XJ8.

But instead of being a drain on his wallet, the soaring price of gas has been a financial windfall.

"There's good business in it," Holler told CNN. "They're older models, but because everyone's dumping their vehicles you can't beat the price on them."

Holler paid thousands less than the cars' blue book values and also saves on insurance because they're older cars, he said.

One of his friends bought a Toyota Camry hybrid and is saving about $300 a month on gas, but has a $600 a month car payment, he said.

Holler also is making money off of the SUV glut by buying vehicles at cut rate prices and selling them to people in Central and South America, where gas is cheap and big trucks are in high demand.

"I'm snatching them up as fast as I can," he said.

He says he just bought a pair of 2007 Ford F150s for $9,000 each and he's selling them for $18,000 each. It costs him about $2,200 to ship a vehicle out of the country, which leaves him with a tidy profit.

We asked CNN.com users why they were hanging on to their trucks, vans and SUVs in the face of record oil prices and $4 per gallon gasoline. We heard from hundreds of people, who love their big rigs, or would love to get rid of them. iReport.com: Still driving a gas guzzler?

iReporter Scott Edstrom, of Grand Ledge, Michigan, says he's pretty much stuck with his Chevrolet TrailBlazer because he's "upside down big time."

"I know what I owe on it and I know what they're going for -- significantly lower than what I owe -- so I haven't even attempted to sell it because I know I can't," Edstrom said.

The network IT analyst said gas prices have doubled since he bought the car in 2005 and that he's paying about $100 a week to fill up.

"I've run out money before I've run out of month several months in a row now," Edstrom said. "It's been a struggle to get by."

Kim Davis, a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, software product manager, tried to sell her Land Rover Discovery two years ago, but didn't get a single offer.

Davis is glad she held onto it now, because she said she is only about $1,000 away from paying it off. She said it costs about $70-$85 to fill up.

"I make enough money to drive my car, $4 [for gasoline] isn't going to kill me per se, it's the principle that the United States doesn't have any control of prices," she said. "It seems like things are going out of control."

Davis doesn't drive it much during the week because she works from home and carpools when she has to go to office.

She'll probably trade it for a more fuel efficient SUV one day, she said, but she's not sure putting another new car on the roads is the best thing for the environment either.

"Hopefully they can convert these cars to other fuels," she said.

Cory Werner, of Austin, Texas, has taken auto recycling to an extreme. He drives a 1959 Ford panel wagon that was a Sears delivery truck in a previous life.

The 39-year-old baker said he's been fixing up old cars since he was 16.

"I've never had a car payment in my life," Werner said.

The truck gets surprisingly good gas mileage, he said. About 20 mpg on the highway and 15 mpg in town. He said Austin has a pretty good public transportation system, and he also rides his bike to work a lot.

"My gas bill a month is $140, $200 a month for gas," Werner said. "Some people's full coverage insurance is more than that."

In addition to the cost savings, Werner said he gets the enjoyment of working on old cars and the satisfaction of saving a vehicle from the junkyard.

But there are some drawbacks, especially in the hot Texas summer.

"It's not for everyone. It doesn't have air conditioning," he said. "It's expensive to add air conditioning to an old car."

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What Women Want (Maybe)

Junko Kimura/Getty Images for Showroom Seven

SCIENTIFIC FRONTIERS Lindsay Lohan, right, with Samantha Ronson in Tokyo last year

By ANDY NEWMAN

LADIES! Behold the splendor of the nude male form: sleek and powerful, a miracle of sculpted sinew, striding confidently across the sand or stretching out before you in ever-uncoiling glory.

On second thought, perhaps you’d prefer not to.

So say scientists at the frontiers of research on the eternal question of what women find erotic, the latest answer to which seems to be: not naked guys, or at least not simply naked guys.

“For heterosexual women,” a researcher, Meredith Chivers, says in a new documentary about bisexuality called “Bi the Way,” which was shown at the NewFest film festival in New York last Friday, “looking at a naked man walking on the beach is about as exciting as looking at landscapes.”

Dr. Chivers, a research fellow at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health at the University of Toronto, says she has data to support this assertion. She recently published results of a study in which she showed people video clips of naked men and women in various sexual and nonsexual situations and measured their genital arousal.

Heterosexual women, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by athletic naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: long pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.

What really matters to women, Dr. Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality. Even more than the naked exercisers, they were aroused by videos of masturbation, and more still by graphic videos of couples making love. Women with women, men with men, men with women: it did not seem to matter much to her female subjects, Dr. Chivers said.

“Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t,” she said. “For heterosexual women, gender didn’t matter. They responded to the level of activity.”

Dr. Chivers’s work adds to a growing body of scientific evidence that places female sexuality along a continuum between heterosexuality and homosexuality, rather than as an either-or phenomenon.

“She’s pinpointing what’s kind of obvious, and yet unexplored: that women are so fluid in their sexuality,” one of the directors of “Bi the Way,” Josephine Decker, said at an after-party for the screening at a Russian-themed gay bar in Midtown.

Even in a culture that often cycles through moments of bisexual chic — Britney and Madonna, make way for Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson (photographed smooching in Cannes, France) — and despite survey data showing that young people, in particular, are open to sexual experimentation, bisexuality still tends to be treated as a novelty, a titillating fluke, a phase or even a cover for homosexuality. Dr. Chivers herself was an author of a 2005 study using similar methods that found that men who called themselves bisexual were significantly more aroused by one gender, usually by men.

But women, some researchers say, are fundamentally different. A University of Utah researcher, Lisa M. Diamond, published a study in January in the journal Developmental Psychology that followed the love lives of 79 nonheterosexual women who variously labeled themselves lesbian, bisexual or none-of-the-above. Over 10 years, Dr. Diamond found, the women continued to be attracted to both sexes.

Women’s response to images of coupling extends even to other species, Dr. Chivers found. In a 2004 experiment, and again in the recent study, published in the December 2007 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found women slightly but significantly aroused by footage of bonobo chimps mating. Men showed no such response.

And when Dr. Chivers asked her subjects to rate their own arousal to the videos they watched, the women, whether gay or straight, tended to give higher ratings to films showing women. “Heterosexual women are responding to women, which is counterintuitive,” Dr. Chivers said. “Why are women so turned on by watching other women?” Straight and gay men, as well as lesbians, were more predictably aroused by images of their preferred sex, Dr. Chivers found.

It is tough to know what to make of this information. Dr. Chivers makes no bold claims for it. “To conclude that women are bisexual on the basis of their sexual responding overlooks the complexity and multidimensionality of female sexuality,” she wrote in her paper. She did allow that the apparent flexibility of women “may be related to greater potential for bisexuality in women than in men.”

The makers of “Bi the Way” draw their own conclusions. “What started as a fad may have become a revolution,” a director, Brittany Blockman, says in a voiceover in the film, which traces the romantic peregrinations of five members of what a commentator calls the Whatever Generation. “But either way, it’s clear that young people are redrawing the map of sexuality.”

That’s a conclusion Dr. Chivers, for one, is not ready to draw. Ms. Blockman, 27, who holds an M.A. in medical anthropology from Harvard, said she got the idea for the film when she channel-surfed across “The O.C.” and saw Mischa Barton’s character kiss another young woman.

“When did two girls making out on mainstream teen shows become acceptable and cool?” she said in an interview. “I felt like I’d missed some kind of cultural shift.”

At the after-party for the screening, at Vlada on West 51st Street, the culture seemed to be shifting in several directions simultaneously. A woman in Ziggy Stardust makeup, wearing a prosthesis cast from a man’s penis, participated in a simulated sex act. A while later, the woman, Amy Ouzoonian, a dancer and performance artist, made out on a couch with a mannish woman in a black suit.

“You go along in life looking for that one person,” said Ms. Ouzoonian, 29. “The genitals shouldn’t really matter that much.”

A party guest, Gillian Baine, a private-school teacher (and avowed heterosexual), said that seemed about right to her.

“Young people are not wanting to pigeonhole themselves, and are doing that in a lot of ways,” said Ms. Baine, 28. “They’re feeling less constrained by norms. Or the norms are changing.”

But norms are tricky things. Ms. Decker, 27, one of the movie’s directors, seemed a little embarrassed by her own limited experience.

“The sad thing is, I desperately need to get with a girl,” she said, adding that a few stolen kisses was all she could count on the female side of her sexual ledger. “I just didn’t want it to be some random woman.”

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