I remember clearly the day my Dad brought home one of my favorite movies of all time. It was 1979, it was a Betamax tape and it was Bruce Lee’s “Enter The Dragon“.
I was swept away and immediately wanted to become Bruce Lee. As a lot of you did, I joined a Karate class, but eventually found out that it wasn’t that easy. I have remained a Bruce Lee fan and still enjoy watching that movie when it’s shown on TV.
Recently I’ve learned about another aspect of Bruce Lee that I didn’t know about. I’ve been watching a great documentary I DVR’d about Bruce Lee’s influence on other artists and in Western culture in general and I’ve found out that Lee was actually very much into philosophy.
In one of his few televised interviews (see video below) he mesmerizes us with this thought:
Be formless… shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle; it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot; it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend…
I immediately thought how this could be applied to any entrepreneur thinking of building a new startup and how this is the best approach you could have. At the start (and hopefully throughout) you need to be a flexible enterprise with the ability to morph to your customer’s needs.
Come to think of it, an API is exactly what Lee talks about: it’s your website’s liquid form. If your application doesn’t have an API, it might get stuck really quickly and stop its flow.
Lee found out from his martial arts studies that the existing methods of fighting were too complicated or not to the point. So he invented a completely new form of martial arts called “Jeet Kune Do“, which centers in practicality, flexibility, speed, and efficiency.
He believed that you need to take down your opponent using the most direct, unclassical approach you can figure out at the moment. None of that Karate Kid dancing, you go straight to the heart of your opponent.
A lot of times we forget about this. People need applications that are simple. They do one thing and one thing alone, but it’s the best application to do exactly just that task. If we build a website that tries to solve many things at once (or a Company with hundreds of products, and here I’m thinking Yahoo! and Google), you might be just dancing around an opponent that might take you down with one strike.
Facebook Lite is the best next step for Facebook. FriendFeed was applying this concept and even after its sale, it continues to be, in my mind, the best lifestreaming application out there. Twitter has been smart to stick to the 140 characters and not do any radical changes; that’s why they have become the dominant microblogging platform.
If your site or application can’t be explained in a short-sentence, it’s time to refocus.
Practicality, flexibility, speed, and efficiency. Simple and to the point.
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