The Bruce Lee Code

“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself; do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”
—Bruce Lee
 
Bruce Lee was a brand well before that became commonplace. Step into the Dragon’s mind and explore how he thought about business, goals, and life.
 
The Bruce Lee Code focuses on the business strategies prevalent in Lee’s life and teachings that helped unlock his full potential. Bruce Lee’s attention to brand is a major reason why he continues to influence pop culture today. He was a pioneer, being one of the first Hollywood stars to start his own production company.
 
To recharge America’s creative and entrepreneurial swagger, we need to reexamine Lee’s life and teachings. Although he died in 1973 at age thirty-two, Lee remains a global icon who continues to influence the contemporary world in ways both obvious and subtle.
 
Lee was primarily known for his otherworldly martial arts skills and blockbuster movies such as Enter the Dragon and Fist of Fury. But he was also a man of incredible vision, willpower, and intellectual curiosity whose brief career inspired highly successful projects in Hollywood, sports, comic books, video games, and fashion.
 
In many ways, Lee resembled Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Both men possessed remarkable self-assurance and a desire to disrupt the status quo. Jobs did not invent the computer, tablet, or MP3 player. Instead, Jobs’s genius was taking existing products and ideas and turning them into something better. Lee also did not hesitate to liberally borrow and emulate. He fused Eastern and Western ideas and techniques to make unique films that would appeal to worldwide audiences. He created his own unique style of martial arts and philosophies that drew upon a deep reservoir of historical and contemporary influences.
 
This book draws upon Bruce Lee’s extensive writings, including letters, journals, and business documents, as well as interviews with those who knew him personally.

About the Author:
Thomas Lee is a long-time business journalist who has written extensively about innovation and entrepreneurship for major daily newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, Star Tribune in Minneapolis, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 2013, he won the Gerald M. Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, the top honor for business journalists. In 2014, Palgrave MacMillan published Rebuilding Empires: How Best Buy and Other Retailers are Transforming and Competing in the Digital Age of Retailing. He also serves as editorial director and lead curator for the We Are Bruce Lee exhibit at the Chinese Historical Society of America museum in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He is working with Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter, who runs the Bruce Lee Foundation, to create a retrospective on Bruce Lee’s life and his impact on the current world.