I Can't Make This Up: Life Lessons

by Kevin Hart

Let him who would move the world first move himself. —Socrates

This introduction is mandatory. That means you have to read it. You can’t just skip ahead to the sex scenes.

My life began with one of the biggest lies men tell women: “I’ll pull out, I promise.” Those were the words that turned into me. Of course, my dad had no intention of pulling out. He wasn’t planning on knocking up my mom either. He just never learns from his mistakes.

His other lines were: “I’m just gonna put it in a little and leave it there. I just wanna be close to you.” And then there was the classic, “I’m just gonna rub you with it. I promise I won’t put it in.” I’m surprised there are just two of us.

Life is a story. It’s full of chapters. And the beauty of life is that not only do you get to choose how you interpret each chapter, but your interpretation writes the next chapter. It determines whether it’s comedy or tragedy, fairy tale or horror story, rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags. You can’t control the events that happen to you, but you can control your interpretation of them. So why not choose the story that serves your life the best?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the ability to shoulder-shrug things—to just accept them, say “okay,” and get on with my life. The opposite of shoulder-shrugging would be to get depressed or angry and to hold on to those emotions for the rest of my life. But for whatever reason, whether it was because my father was matter-of-fact about the heaviest stuff or God put something in me, I’ve been able to take in all kinds of experiences and information and process them without holding on to any negative emotion afterward, even at a young age.

And this day, he had something special planned: He took us to what looked like a pond in New Jersey to rent a motorboat so we could go fishing. While we were on the water, I asked if I could drive, and he said, “Go ahead, Kev, I don’t see why not.” A few reasons why not might have included the fact that I was eight, I’d never been in a boat before in my life, and I’d never driven anything besides a bike. But my dad didn’t live in the world of reason. He was a firm believer in the “go ahead” school of parenting; whatever we asked to do, he’d just say “go ahead.”

To this day, I can’t comprehend why he’d sic an attack dog on his own kids just because he lost at basketball. The only reason I can think of is that, in his mind, Dad never loses, so he had to win in some way.

He stopped, and before I jumped out of the car, he gave me a pep talk. “Hey, man, we all got big dicks. So listen, you gonna be cool for the rest of your life.” “What are you talking about, Dad?” “Listen, you see this long dick here?” He gestured to the outline in his sweatpants. He never wore drawers, so he was always flowing loose. “You gonna grow one too, so you never gotta worry about nothing.” “Uh, okay, Dad.”

In his mind, he was never at fault; it was always something stupid I did. Maybe that’s how I learned to have a sense of humor about myself.

At every moment in life, there is a fork in the path you are on. And you can choose to go right or you can choose to go left. Every right you take leads you closer to your best possible destiny; every left leads you further away from it. These forks are not just decisions that lead to actions, like saying yes to a job offer, but thoughts that lead to beliefs, like blaming your father for ruining your life. Your life today is the sum total of your choices. So if you’re not happy with it, look back at your choices and start making different ones. Even if you are struck by lightning and injured, you made choices that led you to that spot at that particular time—and you get to choose how you feel about it afterward. You can be angry at the bad luck that you got struck or grateful for the good luck that you survived.

Defend yourself at all times. Don’t let nobody mess with you. If you don’t stand up to them, they’ll just keep bullying you, and it will get continually worse as they push to the edge of what they can get away with. However, if you stand up to them, and they feel fear after knowing what you’re capable of, they’ll find someone else to belittle. Even if you lose or get beat up, at least you can go to bed at night knowing you’re not the kind of person who tolerates being pushed around.

The real message is: You are somebody. You matter. And no one is allowed to take away your right to your property, your right to your safety, or your right to be yourself. Those are things that should be defended.

I’ve also taught my kids what I learned from my mother: that fighting is a last resort. It’s always better to defuse fights through reason and humor when possible. After those incidents, I didn’t get bullied much. And when someone wanted to start a fight, I learned to de-escalate it just by asking, “What are you doing? Why do you wanna fight and mess up the day? All that’s gonna happen is we’ll both get punished, so let’s see if we can find a better way to work this out.”

When it comes down to choosing between your life and your pride, I’ll keep my life.

There are many horrible and stupid ways you can fuck up as a kid, but one of the worst is doing anything to people who can’t defend themselves, like babies or senior citizens.

I have no doubt that all this came from a place of love, but it was a love so controlling that I felt envious of the neglected kids in school.

In other words, I’m pretty much doing the same thing I did as a kid. I’m living a tightly organized and structured routine, except instead of getting to the mall, I’m spending twelve hours on set just to shoot for thirty-five minutes.

Today, I understand why she wouldn’t accept a ride: She didn’t want to be a burden to anyone. Her heart was so big that she’d rather be out in the cold at night for four hours than inconvenience someone for half an hour. It was always just us—one hundred percent fucking us. And there was no hope for me to experience anything different, because her convictions and her patterns were set in stone.

There was so much shit in that basement, it looked like a city garbage dump. I made more than a fort out of the junk down there; I built a high-end, multiple-room clubhouse, using old cushions and blankets as walls. I hid out there as much as possible to avoid doing more useless chores for her. That was where I first saw a naked woman. I found a Playboy in a pile of clutter, so I took it to the reading room in my clubhouse, where I had a little chair set up. I devoured every square inch of that magazine. As I was reading, I’d hear Ms. Davis calling around the house and outside the front door for me. I’d yell back, “I’m all right.” And I was all right.

However, thanks to Ms. Davis, I learned a skill that would serve me well in life: charm. She constantly threatened to tell my mom if I stepped out of line or didn’t listen to her. And if she said anything to my mom that remotely implied wrongdoing on my part, I’d get a whupping I’d never forget.

I had to escalate to Stage 5 on the Charming Manipulation Scale (CMS) to shut that down. The stages were, as follows: Stage 1: Plead. “Can you please not tell my mom?” Stage 2: Elicit pity. “She’s going to whup me so hard. She just doesn’t understand what it’s like to be a kid.” Stage 3: Engage empathy. “If you had been out there with me, you would have done the same thing.” Stage 4: Appeal to values. “I saw Tao on the corner and I thought he could help me with my homework.” Stage 5: Appeal to self-interest. “I’ll clean your back room if you don’t tell.” Stage 6: Run out of angles. Get ass whupped. When Ms. Davis said, “Boy, if you take that bike around the corner one more time, I will speak with your mama,” I knew I’d succeeded. You never wanted to get to Stage 6.

At that time, just like nearly every other kid, I looked up to Michael Jordan. He wore compression shorts underneath his basketball shorts, so some of the kids on my team began dressing the same way. I made the mistake of saying to my mom, “For Christmas, I wanna get those basketball tights that go under your shorts, like Michael Jordan wears.” “That’s it? That’s what you want for Christmas?” “Yes, please!” When Christmas rolled around, there was a small package from my mom waiting for me under our miniature tree. I tore open the gift wrap, threw the lid off the box, and saw . . . girls’ tights. They were spandex, and really tight—not even remotely close to what Michael Jordan wore.

It’s easy to complain about your life—how tough it is, how unfair it is, how stressful it is, how everyone else has it much better. But if you step into the life of someone you envy for just a day, you’ll discover that everyone has their own problems, and they’re usually worse than yours. Because your problems are designed specifically for you, with the specific purpose of helping you grow. Experiencing a lifestyle without structure, discipline, values, strictness, and work ethic taught me to appreciate them a little more. Instead of just seeing the things my mom was taking away from me, I began to see the things she was giving me. I didn’t flip all the way from resentment to appreciation, but I began that slow process. And logically, no other response to the ups and downs of life makes sense besides gratitude. You are already in your experience. So you can either resent and resist it, and make it that much less enjoyable, or you can accept it and find something positive in it.

And the fucked-up thing is, I waited what seemed like my whole life to get pubic hair, then as soon as I got it, women started saying, “You gotta shave that shit off.” I guess to be a man, you just gotta be able to prove you can grow it. And once you know you can, you’re supposed to get rid of it. Is there a life lesson in this? Probably not. At times, life is random if not downright stupid.

Never quit. That was the message that our varsity basketball coach, Calvin Jones, constantly drilled into our heads. He never got angry and yelled at us like other coaches did. Instead, he related to us and cared for us, and he became a mentor to me and many of the other guys.

To make that happen, however, I first had to do the one thing that every human being must do at some point in their lives, otherwise they haven’t really lived: accept myself.

Having nothing to prove is the most freeing thing in the world. Rather than constantly defending your ego, you can have a sense of humor about your shortcomings.

I was able to make this choice because of my ability to shoulder-shrug things. Because shoulder-shrugging is different than not caring: It’s having perspective. It’s looking at a bigger picture instead of being reactive. By having that outlook, I was eventually able to understand that if someone was making fun of my height or clothing, they weren’t making fun of who I was.

You want to know what that secret is? It’s two words: Have fun.

However, it wasn’t just about the sex. I usually liked her and hung out with her afterward and kept seeing her. If it ended, it was always because she got tired of me and wanted to move on. I was never the type of guy who got angry or upset about a breakup. This is all part of the plan, I’d think. Let’s see what happens next.

The lesson that I drew from this at the time was that I should have tried harder. I should have taken school more seriously; I should have had a plan like everyone else. I still feel that way. But there’s an additional lesson that I get from it now: It’s never too late to start caring.

My future was out there. It was just waiting for me to find it. And the challenge was not to give up on myself just because it seemed like everyone else was pulling ahead of me—and leaving me further and further behind in the months that followed. That’s the test that each of us faces in life: Can you fail and still be strong? Can you not fit in and still accept yourself? Can you lose everything and still keep searching? Can you be in the dark and still believe in the light? Because no matter how low you go and how lost you feel, there is always tomorrow. And tomorrow just may be the day when you get lifted up and find your way. There is just one thing that tomorrow demands of you to make this happen: that you never stop believing in your power to create a better day. This way, when your best possible future comes looking for you—almost always at a time and in a place you least expect it—you will be able to recognize its face and respond to its call. I know this to be true, because although I never saw it coming—even when it came—it’s exactly what happened to me.

It turned out that personality plus knowledge equaled success.

I realized through her that we move through life, especially in our first twenty-five years, as sponges, slowly soaking up information from different people, environments, and experiences—and this becomes us. Some people fill up early and get stuck in their ways, and others keep absorbing their whole lives. From Alice, I soaked up the idea that I can be me and be loved regardless of what others may say or think.

Your friends may love you, but the problem is that they love you as you are. You play a role in their lives that they’ve gotten used to, so they don’t always want you to change. Most of them think their job is to keep you humble and in your place.

Sometimes, other people’s doubt can be the best motivation there is to succeed.

I couldn’t understand it at the time, but later I thought about it. The problem is, many people want you to do things, up to the point where they lose control of you. As long as they’re still your boss or mentor or partner or good friend, it’s fine. But if it starts pulling you away from them or making you more successful than them or keeping you too busy to see them as much, then your dream can become their threat.

Some people hate deadlines, but deadlines are motivation to get things done. My mom’s support, along with that deadline, made me more determined to find another way to make a living with laughter.

Besides talent and timing, success is also about work and relationships. Rolling with TuRae was the first comedy relationship I built, and he quickly became a mentor.

“Whenever you can get ahold of a microphone and be around people, it’s an opportunity to hone your act,” TuRae told me that night, after I expressed my disappointment. “So never turn down those moments.”

As I grew more comfortable with the character, people on the scene started to notice.

They were saying it because I was persistent, and that persistence was starting to show up in small improvements. When you’re trying to make it, you’re not judged necessarily by your talent but by your potential. And that potential is all about your willingness to listen, learn, and improve.

I’d never expected to fall on such hard times. Once I finally found my passion and made a plan, I thought I was set. That’s how it works, right? You make a plan, work hard to execute it, and then succeed.

Everyone is reaching for what they believe is a better future, and not all of those futures are in alignment. Some people’s plans conflict directly with the plans of others: In a basketball game, both teams are planning to win, but only one is going to succeed. Now add to this mess of plans the forces that are beyond our control. There is so much that is greater than us, whatever you believe. So while we get to choose the roads we take, we don’t get to know where they lead. Acceptance, then, is knowing that when your plan fails, or your road dead ends, it means a bigger plan is at work. And I’d rather be part of a big plan than a small one.

Every time I met a comedian, I’d ask if I could open for them. I was never afraid to approach them with my hand out; the worst thing they could say was “No.” And if they did, then I’d stop by their shows and support them anyway. Often they’d come around and that no would turn into a yes.

When the stakes are higher than what you’re used to, there’s one rule: Go with what you know—don’t change it up. Because when you start performing new stuff instead of polished stuff, you’re more likely to bomb. I did my tight five minutes, and I destroyed.

It’s a true act of love to believe in someone and support them wholeheartedly, even though you don’t morally or ethically agree with them.

I decided that night to try letting go of my comedy name. When there are no consequences to taking someone’s advice, then there’s no reason not to test it out and see if it works.

My big moment was over. As much as I wanted to go home and hide from the world, I didn’t want the moment to end; I didn’t know if I’d ever be back there again. So I asked the production manager if we could stay and see the rest of the show.