"If you always put limits on everything you do..."

Add caption

Did Bruce Lee say a lengthy quote that starts with “If you always put limits on everything you do"?

Introduction 

Another Bruce Lee "quote" appeared on my radar today. In full it reads:

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."

Right away I knew something was wrong with this. The more I read "Bruce Lee" speaking like a modern motivational speaker, the less likely it is that he said such words. That prompted me to begin my investigative process.

The Sources 

Tao of Jeet Kune Do Expanded Edition

I checked the seven authoritative sources for Bruce Lee quotes that I described in my article Do Not Pray for an Easy Life. 

Bruce Lee did not saying anything like the quote in question. In fact, the word "plateau" doesn't appear in any of the sources. 

The closest I could get to anything like the quote was this excerpt from The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Expanded Edition:

"To put the heart of the martial arts in your own heart and have it be a part of you means total comprehension and the use of a free style. When you have that, you will know that there are no limits." (emphasis added)

So, in one book Bruce Lee used the phrase "there are no limits," but that is all.

A Possible Origin

Guerrilla Marketing on the Front Lines, 2008

I had a tough time tracking down this fake quote. I found it on a blog post from August 2008, and in a marketing book titled Guerilla Marketing on the Front Lines also published in August 2008. It is possible there are older references in the Internet Archive, but there doesn't seem to be a way to find a specific page when doing an archive-wide search. 

Conclusion

Having traced the quote back to 2008, and having shown that it did not appear in any of Bruce Lee's works, I am satisfied that I have debunked it. 

There may be someone reading this post who thinks "just because the quote doesn't appear in Bruce Lee's works doesn't mean he didn't say it." If that's the case, then what is your source? Do you have some secret stash of communications you shared with Bruce Lee? If so, publish them!

The bottom line is that by 2000, thanks to the work of John Little, multiple books had been published with everything that Bruce Lee said or wrote. Is it possible that there are more writings waiting to be published? If yes, they are likely still in the hands of the Lee family, and not in the hands of someone posting to social media. Should the Lee family or someone working with their archives publish more documents, I will add them to my search repository.

If you have a legitimate source for the quote investigated here that you want to contribute, I'm interested!

If you like this article, and might want to learn more about martial arts history in general, visit Martial History Team, and also check out our Facebook page, Instagram account, and Twitter feed. Be devoted!

Updated 26 Oct 2020: I checked three more sources from the Bruce Lee Library and found no matches there either.