Bruce Lee’s 1969 Definite Chief Aim Note and the Letter Behind It

Bruce Lee’s 1969 Letter to Himself and the Principles Behind It

In January 1969, Bruce Lee sat down and wrote a short note to himself under the heading “My Definite Chief Aim.” He was 28, known in America mainly as Kato, the sidekick from a cancelled TV series, and his film career had barely begun. The note set three targets: become the best-paid Asian star in the United States, reach world fame from 1970, and hold $10 million by the end of 1980. It closed with a quieter wish:

“I will live the way I please and achieve inner harmony and happiness.” (Bruce Lee, January 1969)

Lee died four and a half years later, so he never lived to see how far his name would travel. This piece looks at what the note actually said, a much earlier letter that shows where his thinking came from, what really happened next, and the handful of principles readers still take from it.

What the 1969 “Definite Chief Aim” note says

The handwritten page, marked “secret” at the top and bottom, is short. In it Lee promises that he will give audiences the most exciting performances he can and the best quality he is capable of as an actor. In return he expects recognition and money on a specific timetable: world fame starting in 1970, and a fortune of ten million dollars within the following decade.

Two details are worth noticing. First, the title is not his invention. “Definite chief aim” is a phrase from the self-help writer Napoleon Hill, whose courses and books urged readers to write down a single clear goal, put a date on it and read it daily. Lee owned Hill’s work, and the note follows that recipe closely: a named outcome, a deadline, and what he would give in exchange.

Second, the money is not the last word. The note ends with freedom and inner calm, which fits everything else Lee wrote about himself. He was ambitious, but he kept describing success as a by-product of doing work he loved well.

The January 1969 note, written in Lee’s own hand and signed at the bottom right.

What actually happened between 1969 and 1973

Older versions of this story say Lee hit every target before he died. The real timeline is more interesting and more human.

1969–1970: Hollywood offered Lee small roles and passed him over for leads. He went back to Hong Kong, where producers were willing to build films around him.
1971–1972: The Big Boss, Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon broke box-office records across Asia and made him a star in the region.
20 July 1973: Lee died in Hong Kong at 32. The official cause was cerebral oedema, a swelling of the brain, though the exact trigger is still debated.
26 July 1973: Enter the Dragon, the Warner Bros. co-production that finally made him a household name in the West, opened six days after his death.

So the “world fame” part came true, but mostly after he was gone, and the ten-million-dollar fortune by 1980 was not something he lived to hold. That does not make the note a failure: he aimed high, moved fast when Hollywood shut a door, and reached far more people than anyone predicted.

His wider influence is easier to measure. TIME magazine included him in its list of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. His approach to fighting, Jeet Kune Do, which he named in 1967, threw out fixed styles and borrowed whatever worked from boxing, fencing, wrestling and kung fu. Because of that, it is often described as a forerunner of mixed martial arts, and UFC president Dana White has called Lee the father of mixed martial arts.

Lee also changed how Chinese men were shown on screen. For decades Western films had cast them as servants, villains or comic figures, and the insult “sick man of Asia”, which grew out of China’s humiliations in the 19th century, including the Opium Wars with Britain, still stung. In Fist of Fury Lee’s character famously smashes a sign carrying that slur. For many viewers in Asia and in Chinese communities abroad, he replaced a picture of weakness with one of skill, discipline and pride.

The earlier letter to Pearl: where the plan began

The 1969 note did not come from nowhere. About seven years earlier, while studying at the University of Washington in Seattle and teaching kung fu to pay his way, Lee wrote a long letter to a Hong Kong friend named Pearl. It is reproduced in published collections of his correspondence and in several anthologies, and it reads like a young man thinking out loud about his future.

In summary, Lee tells Pearl that there are two routes to a good living: steady labour, and imagination, the second of which can produce real fortune. He says America rewards new ideas, and that his own idea is gung fu. He describes practising it as exercise, mental training, self-defence and a philosophy all at once, and complains that almost nobody in the United States has heard of it while judo and karate flourish.

His plan was to open a first Gung Fu Institute and grow it into a national network over ten to fifteen years. He lists his reasons openly: to show the world the value of a Chinese art, because he enjoys teaching, to give his family a comfortable home, to create something original, and because the art is part of who he is. Making money, he insists, is not the only goal. One line sums up his attitude to reward:

“My contribution will be the measure of my reward and success.”

The rest of the letter is more spiritual. He retells an anecdote about the engineer Charles Proteus Steinmetz predicting that the next great frontier would be spiritual rather than technical. He describes a creative force inside himself that is bigger than ambition or confidence, compares a clear plan to a pebble whose ripples spread across a pond, and admits that right now he owns little more than a small basement space. He ends by saying his goal is peace of mind, with Taoism and Zen teaching him detachment, and signs off with a blunt question to his friend:

“If you don’t aim at an object, how the heck on earth do you think you can get it?”

He did open the Lee Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute in Seattle, later added schools in Oakland and Los Angeles, and taught students who included film stars and athletes. The chain of institutes he imagined never appeared, but the ideas he taught spread much further through film than any school could have carried them.

Six principles readers take from Lee’s notes

Writers who have studied these two documents usually draw out a similar set of lessons. Here they are in plain terms, with a practical step for each.

1. Know why you want it

Lee’s list of motives in the Pearl letter is the most revealing part. Teaching, family, pride in his culture and the simple fact that the art was part of him gave him reasons to keep going when money and recognition were missing. Try it: write down three reasons for your goal that would still matter if nobody ever praised you for it.

2. Choose work that keeps you interested

He trained and studied almost obsessively, but it did not look like grim duty. Long practice is far easier to sustain when the activity itself holds your attention. Try it: notice which tasks make you lose track of time and look for ways to do more of them.

3. Don’t let present circumstances set the ceiling

A student in a basement planning a national network sounds unrealistic, and in a literal sense it was. Yet the belief that his situation was temporary pushed him to act. Call it willpower, drive or, as Lee did, a spiritual force; the useful part is refusing to treat today as a verdict on tomorrow.

4. Educate yourself constantly

Lee reportedly built a personal library of more than 2,500 books, heavy on philosophy and martial arts. Self-help classics often listed among his reading include Think and Grow Rich, The Power Of Positive Thinking and As a Man Thinketh. Whatever you are trying to do, someone has likely written about it, and reading widely is the cheapest mentor there is.

5. Back yourself, especially after setbacks

Confidence in Lee’s sense was not swagger. It was a decision to keep going regardless of rejection, and he faced plenty of it in Hollywood. Try it: when something fails, write down one thing you learned and one next step before you allow yourself to judge the outcome.

6. Turn thought into action

Both documents are plans, not daydreams. When American studios hesitated, Lee flew to Hong Kong and made films there. Thinking and reading only matter when they change what you do this week.

Does writing your goals down really help?

Many people try Lee’s method after reading this story, so it is worth being honest about what it can and cannot do. Writing a specific goal with a deadline is a sensible habit: it forces clarity and gives you something to measure progress against. But stories like this one suffer from survivorship bias. We remember the note because Lee became famous; we never see the thousands of similar notes written by people whose plans did not work out.

It also helps to know that Napoleon Hill, the source of the “definite chief aim” idea, made many claims about his own life that biographers have not been able to verify, including his famous commission from Andrew Carnegie. His methods can still be useful, but they are motivational tools rather than proven science.

The fairest lesson from Lee is probably a mix of both views. A written aim gave him direction. Years of daily training, a willingness to change countries and a real gift did the rest. The note was the start of the work, not a substitute for it.

The quieter goal: harmony and happiness

It is easy to focus on the money and fame in the 1969 note and miss its final line. In the letter to Pearl he says plainly that possessions do not add up to peace of mind, and that real accomplishment of self matters more than proving something to others. His later writing about being formless and adaptable, like water, carries the same idea.

For readers today, that might be the most useful part of the whole story. Set a bold aim, give generously in return, take action, and keep asking whether the life you are building is one you actually want to live.

Sources: Bruce Lee (Wikipedia); Jeet Kune Do (Wikipedia); Napoleon Hill (Wikipedia); TIME 100. Earlier write-ups that inspired this piece: Gavin Nascimento, A New Kind of Human and Better Humans.

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