Why Bruce Lee and Spiders Mock Our Obsession with Labels

Why do the greatest minds in history—Da Vinci, Newton, Ben Franklin—seem to master not just one field, but many? Meanwhile, today’s experts spend their whole lives digging deep into a single specialization, yet breakthroughs feel slower than ever. What did these polymaths understand that we’ve forgotten? The answer lies in how we see knowledge itself—not as separate islands, but as a vast, interconnected ocean.

Human knowledge is not a tidy library of neatly shelved facts but a boundless, living ocean. Here, there are no rigid borders—no signs declaring “this is marine biology” or “that is botany.” The divisions we create are merely arbitrary labels, not laws of nature. Nature itself mocks our rigid labels: a spider is engineer, mathematician, and artist, weaving silk that defies material science while crafting geometries as precise as poetry.

The same principle applies to martial arts. While some cling rigidly to tradition, believing only in their style's superiority, true mastery lies in transcending such limits. Bruce Lee embodied this by refusing to be confined—mixing boxing, kung fu, and even fencing at a time when such cross-training was rare. "Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own," was his philosophy. Be water, my friend—adaptable, formless, and unbound.

This is the mindset to embrace: seek the grand, unifying ideas across all fields—physics, biology, computers, economics, psychology, ethics, etc—for the boundaries between them are imaginary, self-imposed by human minds.