Before he became a legend, Bruce Lee was a brash young man willing to fight for what he believed.

When he opened his gung-fu school in Oakland, that belief was put to the test. The local Chinese martial arts community, locked in tradition, gave him an ultimatum: stop teaching non-Chinese or fight for the right to continue.

It was 1964. America had just passed the Civil Rights Act – legally ending segregation, but not erasing it. Even within Lee’s culture, the walls around knowledge remained high.

Lee chose to tear them down. The fight lasted three minutes. He won, but he didn’t feel victorious.

It should have taken one minute, Lee thought. Something in his training had failed him. His techniques, honed in the rigidity of classical forms, had limited him.

That’s when Bruce Lee, already a teacher, became a student again.

Four decades later, I wrestled with the same question: can I start over?

I’d earned my black belt – 10 years in a historic martial art. I knew how to roll, how to throw a human being, how to break bones. But I also knew that none of it worked when I needed it most.

And so I let it go.

I entered a combatives school, one that trained law enforcement and military. I was armed with nothing but questions and doubt. My old beliefs resisted. My ego took a bruising. I was unlearning my old ways, but in the arena, something truer was stirring.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” – Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

Lee called this a process of continuing growth. Not a style. Not a crystallisation. But a way of honestly questioning and expressing oneself.

He began anew by breaking down his preconceptions. Lee learnt without limits, blending fencing, boxing, Wing Chun, and new and old training methods. Not to create a new style but to dismantle them.

Out of that exploration came Jeet Kune Do – ‘the way of the intercepting fist’, a way of fighting, but also a way of seeing. The JKD symbol declares: “Having no way as way. Having no limitation as limitation.”

In the movie Way of the Dragon, Lee fights Chuck Norris in a Roman colosseum. At first, Norris has the upper hand. Lee takes a beating, then adapts. He bends, feints, switches rhythm. Norris stays rigid and loses.

Bruce Lee died at 32, still evolving. He’s remembered as a master, but maybe what made him great was his willingness to be a student.