Reflections After 1 Year: Honestly Expressing Myself

Bennett Lee

Sep 11, 2024 • 4 min read

It's been about 1 year since I started this blog. My original goal was to document my thought process and journey of starting my new startup, Veridian, but it took a few turns. After some foundational posts on where I started with venture ideation and then breaking down the climate problem, I had more thoughts and opinions on various topics I've meditated on over the years: psychology, business, and philosophy.

At first, I thought about a very strict framework for what I was trying to accomplish here. I thought about my ultimate goal of growing my startup and the strict rules of content creation to achieving that goal.

I read every article of:

how to structure a post to trend on SEO,
how to use ChatGPT to write content for you, and
how to analyze metrics to grow your following,

but after that long exercise, I felt claustrophobic. I felt like a slave to the thoughts and ideas I was trying to articulate. Everything was based around corporate rules that increasingly become more rigid. I felt like everything had to be too purposeful.

1) Bruce Lee

I wrote a piece on LinkedIn recently about my admiration for Bruce Lee (posted here below for convenience)

I was reminded of what drew me to tracing his journey, studying Wing Chun/JKD (Hawkins Cheung lineage) for almost a decade. The unique movements and the deep philosophy drew me to it. GM Hawkins along with others in that community had wonderful blogs where they would try to pass along their knowledge and thoughts about a lifetime of experiences. I didn't get to ever meet him in person, but I appreciated his thoughts and ideas that he put together shortly before his passing.

Bruce Lee spoke about "Honestly Expressing Yourself". It was an idea that changed my life, especially as I was searching for a path as an entrepreneur.

Honestly expressing yourself...it is very difficult to do. I mean it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky and be flooded with a cocky feeling and then feel like pretty cool...or I can make all kind of phony things, you see what I mean, blinded by it or I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself...now that, my friend, is very hard to do.

Entrepreneurship is one of the most creative faculties of a human being. In business, it is the most creative. Ironically, beyond design thinking/innovation, it typically gets discussed in the context of corporate dogma. There are so many rules: you have to pitch this way, you have to have this plan, you have to act this way.

If there's anything I've learned from all of the training and a decade of actually being an entrepreneur is that it's incredibly misunderstood. A lot of the rules are bullshit.

2) Personal Liberation

“Freedom is something that cannot be preconceived. To realize freedom requires an alert mind, a mind that is deep with energy, a mind that is capable of immediate perception without the process of graduation, without the idea of an end to be slowly achieved. Pre-formations simply lack the flexibility to adapt to the ever changing. At this point many would ask, ‘How then do we gain this unlimited freedom?’ I cannot tell you because it will then become an approach. Although I can tell you what it’s not, I cannot tell you what it is. That, my friend, you will have to find out all by yourself, for there is no help, but self-help.” - Bruce Lee

In life, there are rules, but then the rules disappear, leaving only the essence of the intention of those constructs as a guidance for the novice. I struggled to generate the right words, the right story, the right content structure only to find that I was fighting an enemy that didn't actually exist. Those rules didn't exist; I let them govern my actions and limit my expressions.

I learned this lesson years back, yet I had let this poison my work in my writings and my work.

3) Where to From Here?

Through my own journey starting another company and through my various channels (LinkedIn, Twitter/X, etc...), I decided to break my mold and write about whatever I feel like writing about as I try to find deeper insights fueled by a continuous search for greater authenticity.

That's the only way to evince the inner creative force that generates something special. I don't expect any immediate effects from any of my writings, but I do hope that I come up with greater insights that stand the test of time, offering some deep value to a reader who happens upon these musings at a time when they need it most.

1) Bruce Lee

2) Personal Liberation

3) Where to From Here?

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