Will

by Will Smith

“Stop thinking about the damn wall!” he said. “There is no wall. There are only bricks. Your job is to lay this brick perfectly. Then move on to the next brick. Then lay that brick perfectly. Then the next one. Don’t be worrying about no wall. Your only concern is one brick.”

When I focused on the wall, the job felt impossible. Never-ending. But when I focused on one brick, everything got easy—I knew I could lay one damn brick well. . . .

As the weeks passed, the bricks mounted, and the hole got just a little bit smaller. I started to see that the difference between a task that feels impossible and a task that feels doable is merely a matter of perspective. Are you paying attention to the wall? Or are you paying attention to the brick? Whether it was acing the tests to get accepted into college, hitting it big as one of the first global hip-hop artists, or constructing one of the most successful careers in Hollywood history, in all cases, what appeared to be impossibly large goals could be broken down into individually manageable tasks—insurmountable walls comprised of a series of conceivably layable bricks.

For my entire career, I have been absolutely relentless. I’ve been committed to a work ethic of uncompromising intensity. And the secret to my success is as boring as it is unsurprising: You show up and you lay another brick. Pissed off? Lay another brick. Bad opening weekend? Lay another brick. Album sales dropping? Get up and lay another brick. Marriage failing? Lay another brick. Over the past thirty years, like all of us, I have dealt with failure, loss, humiliation, divorce, and death. I’ve had my life threatened, my money taken away, my privacy invaded, my family disintegrated—and every single day, still, I got up, m...

The only question is, are you going to get...

commanders and missions, a military mind-set that informed every aspect of his life. He would come to run our family as though we were a platoon on a battlefield and the Woodcrest house was our barracks. He didn’t ask us to clean our rooms or to make our beds—he commanded, “Police your area.” In his world, there was no such thing as a “small thing.” Doing your homework was a mission. Cleaning the bathroom was a mission. Getting groceries from the supermarket was a mission. And scrubbing a floor? It was never just about scrubbing a floor—it was about your ability to follow orders, to exhibit self-discipline, and to complete a task with the utmost perfection. “Ninety-nine percent is the same as zero” was one of his favorite sayings. If a soldier failed his or her mission, it had to be repeated until perfected. And to disobey a command meant you faced a court-martial, and the punishment usually came in the form of a belt to your bare ass. (He’d say, “Take ’em off, I ain’t gon’ beat my clothes.”) In Daddio’s mind, everything was life or death. He was preparing his children to thrive in a harsh world—a world that he saw as chaotic and brutal. The instilling of fear was—and still is to a large degree—a cultural parenting tactic in the Black community. Fear is embraced as a survival necessity. It is a widely held belief that in order to protect Black children, they must fear parental authority. The instilling of fear is viewed as an offering of love.

My imagination is my gift, and when it merges with my work ethic, I can make money rain from the heavens.

When I say silly stuff, it makes the world lighter for her. But she needs me to say smart stuff, too. That makes her feel safe. She thinks that the only way I’ll be able to survive is if I’m intelligent.

Comedy is an extension of intelligence. It’s hard to be really funny if you’re not really smart. And laughter is Mom-Mom’s medicine. In a way, I’m her little doctor, and the more she laughs, the more silly, smart, spectacular shit I make up. •

bliss. I love the ecstasy of a person’s rapt attention, taking them on a roller-coaster ride of their emotions locked in harmony with my fantasy creation. For me, the border between fantasy and reality has always been thin and transparent, and I’ve been able to step in and out of each effortlessly.

The problem is one man’s fantasy is another man’s lie. I developed a reputation in the neighborhood as a compulsive liar. My friends felt like they could never trust what I said.

But as a child, what the other kids didn’t understand was that I didn’t lie about my perceptions, my perceptions lied to me. I would get lost; sometimes I would lose track of what was real and what I had made up. It became a defense mechanism—my mind wouldn’t even contemplate what was true. I would think, What do they need to hear to be OK?

The bigger the fantasy you live, the more painful the inevitable collision with reality. If you cultivate the fantasy that your marriage will be forever joyful and effortless, then reality is going to pay you back in equal proportion to your delusion. If you live the fantasy that making money will earn you love, then the universe will slap you awake, in the tune of a thousand angry voices.

We all delude ourselves a little bit around the things that scare us. We’re afraid of not being accepted by people at work, or at school, or on Twitter, so we convince ourselves that they’re stuck-up or ignorant or cruel. We concoct entire narratives about other people’s lives when in fact we have no clue what they’re thinking or feeling or struggling with. We invent these stories to protect ourselves. We imagine all sorts of things to be true about ourselves or the world, not because we’ve seen evidence for it, but because it’s the only thing that keeps us from collapsing back into fear. Sometimes we’d rather blindfold ourselves than take a cold, hard look at the world exactly as it is. The problem is delusion works like poisoned honey—it tastes sweet in the beginning but ultimately ends in sickness and misery. The stories we tell ourselves, which are designed for our protection, are the same stories that create the walls that prevent the very connections we so desperately crave.

My fantasy life, while in some ways protecting me, also caused me to feel more guilt and shame and more self-loathing. All fantasies eventually fail. No matter how hard you fight, the truth is undefeated; reality remains the undisputed champ.

Gigi didn’t make a distinction between your burdens and her own. She truly believed the message of the Gospel. She saw loving and serving others not as a responsibility but as an honor. I never heard her gripe about working the graveyard shift. Never heard her say a negative word about my father, even though he had beaten her daughter.

When she was talking, I felt like I was getting explicit instructions from God. So her approval wasn’t simply the adoration of a loving, gentle grandmother—her approval was how I would access and harness the power and favor of the Lord.

Funny is color-blind; comedy defuses all negativity. It is impossible to be angry, hateful, or violent when you’re doubled over laughing.

My Black friends preferred their jokes more real and raw and demanded a gritty slice of truth at the core of the comedy. They saw my silliness as weakness—I would have got the whole shit kicked out of me if I’d tried to light a fart in Wynnefield. They responded better when my humor sprang from strength, from more of a battle mentality—put-downs, insults, disses, and nothing played bigger than smashing somebody who was talking shit. They loved it when someone got what was coming to them—karmic justice—even if the somebody was them. As Black people, we love laughing at ourselves. When we can joke about something—our pains, our problems, our tragedies—it makes them just a little bit more bearable.

I began to equate laughter with safety.

Truly intelligent people do not have to use language like this to express themselves. God has blessed you with the gift of words. Be sure you are using your gifts to uplift others. Please show the world that you are as intelligent as we think you are.

Lying in my bed, I was overcome with shame. Had I used my words to uplift others? I thought about this kid sitting in a jail cell somewhere—What is his grandmother doing right now? He had potentially thrown his whole life away, a demise maybe not caused but certainly provoked by my words. I knew for certain I didn’t want to be that kinda person. But my shame slowly began to give way to a staggering realization of the power of words. I knew that I had unconsciously caused my whole day—I didn’t know exactly how, but I knew for damn sure I had done it. I sensed for the first time that I wasn’t weak; in fact, I was infinitely powerful—I just had no control over it. My imagination was running wild with the possibilities. God had indeed blessed me with the gift of words. And that night, I was getting my first glimpse of the power of those words to alter and shape my reality. And then I asked myself, If I have this much power, shouldn’t I use it for good? Words can affect how people view themselves, how they treat each other, how they navigate the world. Words can build people up, or they can tear them down. I decided that night that I wanted to use my words to empower others, to help rather than hurt.

Nobody could rock the crowd with a punch line the way I did. What nobody seemed to ever understand was that you can’t beat funny. You can spit all the tough gangster shit you want—you can rip rhymes about all the money and women in the world—but if your pants are just a little bit too far above your shoes, and somebody says, Look at you, homey, pretendin’ you all fly looks like your shoes went to a party and your pants got high

Rapping changed everything for me. For the first time in my life, I was popular. I was getting attention and respect. Ready Rock and I were from Wynnefield, but Overbrook was in Hilltop. Many times, in these battles, we’d be reppin’ for Wynnefield. So a lot of the same neighborhood guys who used to pick on me and make fun of me were now getting hyped when I showed up. I was making new friends; girls were starting to feel me. Ready Rock and I became inseparable.

Learning is really easy when you can feel that your teachers love you. Miss Brown began to jokingly call me “Prince Charming.” She’d sarcastically say things like, “Oh, look, Prince Charming has graced us with his homework this Monday morning. How kind of him.” The kids would laugh, and I would eat

In order to feel confident and secure, you need to have something to feel confident and secure about. We all want to feel good about ourselves, but many of us don’t recognize how much work that actually takes. Internal power and confidence are born of insight and proficiency. When you understand something, or you’re good at something, you feel strong, and it makes you feel like you have something to offer. When you have adequately cultivated your unique skills and gifts, then you’re excited about approaching and interacting with the world. And what I learned from Paul was that being good at something allows you to be calm in a storm, knowing that you can handle whatever comes. There is a great Bruce Lee quote that resonates with me. One of Lee’s students once asked him, “Master, you constantly speak to us of peace, yet every day you train us to fight. How do you reconcile these conflicting ideas?” And Bruce Lee responded, “It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war.”

There are rare moments as an artist that you cannot quantify or measure. As much as you try, you can rarely reproduce them and it’s near impossible to describe them. But every artist knows what I’m talking about—those moments of divine inspiration where creativity flows out of you so brilliantly and effortlessly that somehow you are better than you have ever been before.

“Look at the five people you spend the most time with because that’s who you are.” This is an idea I’ve always understood innately. Deep down inside, I knew that my dreams would be made or broken by the people I chose to surround myself with. Confucius had it right: It’s nearly impossible for the quality of your life to be higher than the quality of your friends. And by the grace of God, there has never been a single moment in my life when I have looked to my left or to my right and not seen an extraordinary friend, someone who believed in me and was down for whatever.

JL was one of those guys who didn’t care about fame or money; he wasn’t flashy, and he didn’t want fancy clothes or sparkly jewels. He prided himself simply on defending the people he loved.

To her, a college education was the fundamental bedrock of a successful life. And without it, I was doomed. Hope sustains life. Hope is the elixir of survival during our darkest times. The ability to envision and imagine a brighter day gives meaning to our suffering and renders it bearable. When we lose hope, we lose our central source of strength and resilience. My mother’s hopes for her kids had sustained her through the darkest years of her marriage. But now, I had developed hopes of my own. I had hip-hop hopes. I had hopes for albums and being onstage in front of fifty thousand people shouting “Hoooooo!!” when I told them to. These hopes were now empowering and sustaining me. I would have died if I had to give them up. I couldn’t; I wouldn’t.

Our hopes had finally collided. And these hopes were inherently incompatible with each other. One had to give way. One of us was going to have our heart broken. The thing I’ve learned over the years about advice is that no one can accurately predict the future, but we all think we can. So advice at its best is one person’s limited perspective of the infinite possibilities before you. People’s advice is based on their fears, their experiences, their prejudices, and at the end of the day, their advice is just that: it’s theirs, not yours. When people give you advice, they’re basing it on what they would do, what they can perceive, on what they think you can do. But the bottom line is, while yes, it is true that we are all subject to a series of universal laws, patterns, tides, and currents—all of which are somewhat predictable—you are the first time you’ve ever happened. YOU and NOW are a unique occurrence, of which you are the most reliable measure of all the possibilities. I’ve always loved the scene in The Pursuit of Happyness on the basketball court, in which Jaden’s character shoots the ball and yells, “I’m going pro!” My character, Chris Gardner, discourages him from pursuing basketball but catches himself: “Don’t ever let somebody tell you you can’t do something, not even me. . . . You got a dream . . . you gotta protect it. People can’t do something themselves, they want to tell you you can’t do it. If you want something, go get it. Period.”

“Jus’ remember, Lover Boy,” she said, “be nice to everybody you pass on your way up, coz you just might have to pass them again on your way down.”

People often say ignorance is bliss. Maybe . . . right up until it’s not. We punish ourselves for not knowing. We always complain about what we could and should have done, and how much of a mistake it was that we did that thing, that unforgivable thing. We beat on ourselves for being so stupid, regretting our choices and lamenting the horrible decisions we make. But here’s the reality—that’s what life is. Living is the journey from not knowing to knowing. From not understanding to understanding. From confusion to clarity. By universal design you are born into a perplexing situation, bewildered, and you have one job as a human: figure this shit out. Life is learning. Period. Overcoming ignorance is the whole point of the journey. You’re not supposed to know at the beginning. The whole point of venturing into uncertainty is to bring light to the darkness of our ignorance. I heard a great saying once: Life is like school, with one key difference—in school you get the lesson, and then you take the test. But in life, you get the test, and it’s your job to take the lesson. We’re all waiting until we have deep knowledge, wisdom, and a sense of certainty before we venture forth. But we’ve got it backward—venturing forth is how we gain the knowledge.

Now, I don’t want to be the old guy at the end of the bar yapping about how much better music was in his day. How these kids don’t know nothin’ about real rap. There is actually brain science that theorizes that the songs you hear in your teenage years become embronzed in your emotional memory, heightening their nostalgic power beyond any other period in your life.

We were riding high, but in hindsight, imperceptible seeds of impending discontent were being sown. Some people thrive at high altitudes, but others can’t breathe. And what do people do when they climb a mountain and realize the air is too thin? They try to get back down as fast as possible. Quincy Jones called it “altitude sickness.”

was, clicked into harmonious agreement. The energy of the town excited me. I needed less sleep; I was always refreshed; my skin looked better; I was eating right; I wanted to work out. I was inspired. I have since realized the critical importance of environment. Choosing the city you live in is as important as choosing your life partner.

Becoming famous is about as much fun as the material world has to offer. Being famous, bit of a mixed bag; but fading famous sucks ass.

There’s a strange thing that happens when someone falls: Your demise somehow proves to everyone you’ve ever disagreed with that they were right, and you were wrong. They develop a smugness and seem to get a brutal enjoyment out of the fact that God is finally punishing you. People tend to have a schizophrenic relationship with winners—if you’re down too long, you become an underdog and they feel impelled to root for you. But if you’re ever unfortunate enough to be up too long, you better get a helmet.

The universe is not logical, it’s magical. A major aspect of the pain and mental anguish we experience as humans is that our minds seek, and often demand, logic and order from an illogical universe. Our minds desperately want shit to add up, but the rules of logic do not apply to the laws of possibility. The universe functions under the laws of magic.

Quincy Jones understands magic. He sees the universe as an infinite playground of magical possibilities. He recognizes miraculous potential in every moment and every thing and everyone around him. His superpower is that he has learned to present himself to the universe as a lightning rod, placing himself perfectly to capture and conduct the ever-present, ever-recurring magical flashes of brilliance surrounding us all. Quincy Jones is an intuitive, artistic storm chaser. He can sense the subtle flickerings of the impossible preparing to strike.

Gigi had a similar idea—she would say, “Don’t block your blessings.” Even though these possibilities are abundantly and perpetually flowing around us, we can miss them, or even worse, block or repel them. Gigi used to love to tell the Bible story of the death of Lazarus. Lazarus was a great friend of Jesus, so when he fell ill and died, Lazarus’s sisters, Martha and Mary, were devastated. They had sent word to Jesus, begging him to hurry. Jesus had to walk two hot dusty days from the other side of the River Jordan. He was already exhausted—he’d worked all week, preaching during the Feast of Dedication. When he arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had already been dead and buried for four days. When Jesus approached the tomb, he saw that the rock was still in place at the mouth of the cave, as was the burial tradition of the time. Jesus wept, perturbed, and said—and I paraphrase . . . “So, lemme get this straight. Y’all made me walk fifteen frickin’ furlongs—’scuse my language—to hot-dag’on Bethany, where Pharisees and Sadducees is runnin’ around here like roaches just waiting for a chance to take a pop at me, to perform the miracle of raising your patriarch from the dead, restoring your family to blessed wholeness and light, and y’all can’t even move the rock from in front of the tomb? If I’m gonna raise this boy from the dead, the least y’all lazy jokas could do is move the dag’on rock!”

Magic demands awareness (faith—you have to believe in magic); preparation (move the rock—we must identify and eradicate the poisonous resistances and impediments within ourselves); then, surrender (stay out of the way and trust the magic to do what it does). Quincy helped people get their rocks out of the way of the blessed light that is always trying to shine in. The universe wants you to have the miracle! Move the damn rock!

The Alchemist is probably the most influential book I’ve ever read. It empowered my dreamer’s spirit and validated my suffering. If Santiago could suffer, survive, and claim his treasure, then so could I. An alchemist is a spiritual chemist, a master of transmutation. The great feat of an alchemist is that they can do the impossible: They can turn lead into gold. This concept erupted in my mind—the ability to take anything that life gives you and turn it into gold.

Quincy Jones is an alchemist, and he had set my mind on fire; I had never met anybody like him. I wanted to be an alchemist, too. I wanted to be able to transform anything and everything that life gave me into gold. The universe had given me a second chance, and I swore to God that I would not need a third.

Change can be scary, but it’s utterly unavoidable. In fact, impermanence is the only thing you can truly rely on. If you are unwilling or unable to pivot and adapt to the incessant, fluctuating tides of life, you will not enjoy being here. Sometimes, people try to play the cards that they wish they had, instead of playing the hand they’ve been dealt. The capacity to adjust and improvise is arguably the single most critical human ability. There’s a Buddhist parable that has guided me through many a perilous transition: A man is standing on the banks of a treacherous, raging river. It’s rainy season—if he can’t get to the other side, he’s done. He quickly builds a raft and uses it to safely cross the river. In joyous relief, he high-fives himself, lifts the raft, and heads toward the forest. But as he attempts to make his way through the dense tree cover, the raft is banging and knocking into trees and becoming entangled in vines, preventing him from moving forward. He only has one chance for survival: He must leave the raft behind—the vessel that saved his life yesterday is the same one that will kill him today if he does not let it go. The raft represents our outmoded ideas and old ways of thinking that no longer serve us. For example, the same angry, aggressive persona you cultivated as a child to protect yourself from bullies and predators will now destroy every relationship you have if you’re unwilling to let it go. Things can be perfectly useful and absolutely necessar...

A threat is one thing; violence is something else. But when you grow up in violent environments, your mind adapts to perceive threats everywhere. You reason that you cannot afford to get caught slipping, even once. You begin to respond to a perceived threat and to actual violence equally, even though they’re very different things.

psychography, or automatic writing, is a theoretical psychic ability allowing someone to produce written words without consciously writing. (Skeptics call it self-delusion; I call it “another Grammy” and “my first #1 record.”)

Fortunately, there’s an interesting thing that happens when you watch TV—your eyes focus on the person who’s talking. This is a form of something called “inattentional blindness.” Daniel Simons, in Smithsonian magazine, describes it like this: “This form of invisibility depends not on the limits of the eye, but on the limits of the mind. We consciously see only a small subset of our visual world, and when our attention is focused on one thing, we fail to notice other, unexpected things around us—including those we might want to see.”

As an actor, this is the single most important question to ask of the character you are preparing to portray. His “want”/dramatic quest is the first pillar of behavior. What someone desires is a portal into the essential truth of their personality. If you want to understand why someone did something, you need only answer the question, What did he want? An actor’s overarching focus is to unearth the “system of wants” that intertwine and sometimes collide within the mind of a character to create their psychological driving force. Acting is like building out a new personality for yourself from scratch. (Once you have a foundational comprehension of a character’s central motivation, the real acting fun begins with the second question: Why does he want it? But that’s for later.)

The war between desire and obstacle is the heart and soul of dramatic storytelling (sometimes, the obstacles are internal—those are the fun ones). In filmmaking circles, there is a simple axiom that describes the structure of a great character journey: somebody wants something badly, and goes for it, against all odds. (Another variation is, a person falls into a hole, and tries to get out.) If you think about any movie you’ve ever liked, any character you’ve ever rooted for, it’s because they wanted something you could relate to and they struggled, risking life and limb, to achieve it. What’s true about movies is also true about life: You tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you who you are.