Bruce Lee famously feared not the man who had practiced 10,000 kicks once, but the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. Now, I do not claim to be any sort of expert in the martial arts. And I would not dare to impugn the wisdom of one of the greatest athletes and film stars of the 20th century. But there is a phenomenon whereby experts get so deep into the weeds on a subject that they require the broad perspective of a layperson to correct their myopic focus. I believe this is one such case.

I mean, come on. It’s a cute saying, but you’re not worried about the guy who knows 10,000 kicks? That’s an inconceivable variety of foot-based attacks. And before you tell me that I’m missing the point, I get it. A man who’s practiced one kick 10,000 times has dedicated himself to mastery. Yeah. Mastery of one kick. Big deal. If I practice drawing one cat over and over again, does that make me a great artist? No, it makes me Jim Davis. Are you afraid of Jim Davis? I didn’t think so.

Maybe the problem here is one of scale. Our minds aren’t great with big numbers, whether we’re talking about the wealth of billionaires, the vast distances comprising the universe, or 10,000 kicks. I don’t mean to belabor the point here, but that’s a lot of different kicks.

Think about it. How many kinds of kicks can you name? There’s sort of a straight kick out in front of you. Or you could kick to the side. And I guess if you were really in trouble you could kick behind you, like a spooked horse bucking a hapless goon into a duck pond in a family-friendly action-comedy movie from the 1990s. That’s three. Three kinds of kicks.

If you put a gun to my head, I might be able to come up with a dozen kicks or so. Like, maybe you jump and kick at the same time. Or there’s that spinning kick that the guy in Street Fighter does. I don’t know if that works in real life. That’s still only a tenth of a percent of 10,000. So where are the other 9,988 coming from? What kind of person practices 10,000 kicks once? What malevolent forms of legromancy is this twisted practitioner developing?

I don’t know. And that keeps me up at night. A guy who’s practiced one kick 10,000 times, sure, he could be a threat. Probably by that point he’s learned a thing or two about that one kick. But as soon as he throws it, he’s a known quantity. If that man confronted me on a deserted street at two in the morning, I would feel trepidation, certainly. But fear? No. Because the domain of fear is the unknown.

The man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once is unknowable. He is the terror that stalks the shadows, the ghost at the feast. He is the dim cognizance, quieted but never silenced by the pursuit of sex, fantasy, and professional accomplishment, that this world is at its core ruled by chaos. He is the awareness that death strikes seemingly at random and may come at any time, delivered to us by any number of unfathomable, unforeseeable kicks. And compared to that, a guy who’s pretty good at doing one kind of kick is really nothing to worry about.