Jet Li
People often ask me about my early prowess with martial arts. Was I some kind of prodigy? My answer is that from the time I was a young boy, I was always asking, “Why?” I seemed to stand outside of life, observing it from a distance: “Why are things the way they are? Why are we doing it like this and not like that?” My siblings never understood what I was talking about. They were content with the business of life, not the structure underneath.
So when our (martial arts) training started to get serious and the coach said, “Do this one thousand times!” most of my schoolmates just did it a thousand times. Others were tired: They wanted to escape the torment and practiced the movement five hundred times.
But I asked, “Why a thousand?” I thought about the reason and the result before I practiced it. The reason is that an athlete needs to put in energy and repetition to develop skill. But what is the desired result? Perfect execution of the movement.
If you perform a movement a thousand times without thinking, you’re just working your body. You’re not using your mind. The body moves a thousand times, but your mind doesn’t move at all. You may not even be paying attention to the movement. You’re focused only on the number, not on the desired result.
Why drill the movement a thousand times? To make sure you develop muscle memory so your body is completely familiar with the movement and can execute it perfectly every time. But if I use my mind, I can say, “I’m going to do this seven hundred times, each time perfectly.”
I pay attention every time I do the movement. I unify my body and my mind. Then I don’t need to do it a thousand times because my body will remember the perfect movement after only seven hundred times. I wanted to get the benefit of a thousand repetitions with only seven hundred movements.
I was always looking for a shortcut, but I never slacked off. I never said, “Oh, I’ll just do it a hundred times.” If I didn’t work hard enough, the physical component wouldn’t be strong enough. I needed to get the body and mind in balance to produce the result I wanted—quickly and perfectly.
As a result of my way of thinking, I had a different target than my peers did. Their target was to reach the number 1,000; mine was to achieve the result of perfect execution in the shortest amount of time. So every time I did the movement, I contemplated it before I executed it. This way of practicing came naturally to me, and it would characterize my approach not only to martial arts, but later to filming and to Buddhist practice.
