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Instead of seeking to learn as many techniques as you can, a better way to approach learning is to seek to learn all you can about a few techniques that work best for you from as many different instructors as possible. Many instructors may tell you the same thing, which reinforces what you already know, but sometimes one or more may tell you something you do not know that will help you perform a technique more effectively or efficiently.

Absorbing what is useful and rejecting what is useless is a noble goal, but it is similar to the goal of only absorbing the truth and rejecting lies. The problem with both goals is: how do you determine what is useful or useless, or what is true or a lie? Is a technique useless or a fighting theory false because it does not fit into your style? Or, is a technique useful to you just because it is used by your style. Sometimes it is difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Watch open tournaments where different styles fight each other under the same rules. You will see many types of uniforms, many types of rituals, and many types of techniques and movements used in patterns. Some styles will seem polar opposites to each other, however, then they spar, no matter the style of the fighters, they will all spar with basically the same techniques. When sparring a person of the same style, fighters tend to fight the person in the way their style dictates (with many useless techniques). However, when facing a fighter of another style, they fight with techniques that have been proven useful in all situations and against all types of fighters.

By the way, we do not know if Bruce Lee practiced what he preached since he never fought in competitions. We only saw him in staged demonstrations, choreographed movie scenes, or sparring less talented students, where he also used many useless techniques.

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