One feature of an age of change: dogmas that once looked unshakable start to crack. As a kid, I was in awe of that Bruce Lee line:
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
And it does sound beautiful. A clean little maxim for the hustler in all of us. It rang true and it worked — all this time. Until it stopped.
Who practices one kick 10,000 times today? Right — that same AI we supposedly can’t compete with. A neural net will repeat and refine one and the same move ten thousand million times.
So picture Bruce Lee stepping into the ring against a neural net trained on every fight he ever fought. It knows every one of his strikes. It predicts every move. Who wins? Whoever changes the rules of the game.
In the age of AI, “10,000 repetitions” is a straight road to automation. The machine will always be more precise inside a drilled pattern. Your strength is the opposite: connecting the unconnectable. A karate strike, a fencer’s lunge, a queen’s gambit.
So here’s my new formula. Not 10,000 kicks, and not one kick 10,000 times — but 10,000 unexpected combinations drawn from 10,000 domains and contexts.