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?

No matter what you’re going through, there is always another brick sitting right there in front of you, waiting to be laid. The only question is, are you going to get up and lay it?

“only speaks when it improves on silence.”

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

“Never argue with a fool, because from a distance, people can’t tell who’s who.”

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.

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.”

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.

It’s better to die than to walk around scared.

conflicts and misunderstandings had such simple solutions, yet our immaturity demanded that we had to suffer excruciating consequences in order to learn the most basic lessons of human relating.

Daddio used to say, “You can stop a homicide, but you can’t stop no suicide.”

“Pressure busts pipes, homie.” We all have to contend with the natural processes of destruction. Everything is impermanent—your body’s going to get old; your best friend is going to graduate and move to another city; that tree you used to climb in front of Stacey Brooks’s house is going to crash down in a storm. Your parents are going to die. Everything changes; it rises, and it falls. Nothing and no one is immune to the entropy of the universe.

It’s respectable to lose to the universe. It’s a tragedy to lose to yourself.

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.

Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, said there are only two human problems: (1) knowing what you want, but not knowing how to get it; and (2) not knowing what you want.

I chose and made movies for the rest of my career: Joseph Campbell’s theory of the monomyth, the hero’s journey as laid out in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Campbell laid out seventeen stages that encompass what he called the “monomyth,” or “the hero’s journey.” (Christopher Vogler, in his landmark interpretation of Joseph Campbell’s work, The Writer’s Journey, refined the stages to twelve. Chris’s book has become a Hollywood standard and a classic screenwriting textbook throughout the world.)

It is the path of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly; it is the story of Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, Arjuna; it is the story of Cassius Clay becoming Muhammad Ali; it is the universal arc of transformation; it is the story of Santiago in The Alchemist.

Darrell’s style of training is full immersion: He doesn’t ask anybody to do anything that he doesn’t do. Over the next year, he ran every mile, jumped every rope, lifted every weight, sparred as many rounds—every moment of training, right by my side. He ate when I ate; he slept when I slept; he worked when I worked. Often, he would quote Edgar Guest’s poem “The Sermons We See”: I’d rather see a sermon than hear one any day; I’d rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way. The eye’s a better pupil and more willing than the ear, Fine counsel is confusing, but example’s always clear …

You fight how you train was one of Darrell’s central axioms. “You do everything how you do one thing,”

His position was: dreams are built on discipline; discipline is built on habits; habits are built on training. And training takes place in every single second and every situation of your life: how you wash the dishes; how you drive a car; how you present a report at school or at work. You either do your best all the time or you don’t; if the behavior has not been trained and practiced, then the switch will not be there when you need it. “Training is for the purpose of habituating reactions to extreme circumstances,” Darrell said. “When situations get hot, you can’t rely on yo’ thinkin’ mind. You must have habituated reflexive responses that kick in without the necessity of thought. Never de-train your killer instincts.”

In the end, reconciliation is a spiritual process, which requires more than just a legal framework. It has to happen in the hearts and minds of people.

If I could wake up and start an hour earlier than everyone else, and stay an hour later than everyone else, and work through my lunch break, I would be gaining fifteen extra hours every week on the competition. That works out to 780 more productive hours in a year than the next guy—that’s the equivalent of one month. If you give me a one-month start on anybody, they’ll never catch me. And if they need their weekends and vacations, so they can get their beauty rest and recover and maintain their little punk-ass “work-life balance,” then they will always be looking at my taillights.

Then the truth hit me like a 90 mph fastball: Nobody gives a shit about anything except how they feel. Feeling good is the most important thing to everyone, everywhere, at all times. We are choosing our words, actions, and behaviors in order to achieve a feeling that we deem positive. There’s nothing more important than feeling how we want to feel. And people determine whether or not you love them by how well they feel you honor their feelings.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart. Jada sent me this quote from Kahlil Gibran and repeated over and over, “What’s true will remain.”

Memory is not a flawless recording of what actually happened. It’s not a video of your experience. It’s not even a photograph. It is your psychological, artistic rendering. It is more like an abstract impressionist painting of what happened than it is a pure, unfiltered depiction. And it’s not fixed—the painting morphs, it fades or expands over time. Sometimes you add colors to a memory that weren’t there a year ago, or five years ago, or even collapse multiple memories and paint them into one. The problem is that most of us trust our memories implicitly. Our memories are the basis for our perception of reality. We then commit to these conclusions, unlocking the requisite emotions and the corresponding actions and behaviors. We move into the world clinging to our flawed assumptions, unleashing upon ourselves the cosmic consequences of wrong ideas.

I devoured The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Bhagavad Gītā As It Is; The Road Less Traveled; Don Quixote; The Untethered Soul; Teachings of the Buddha; The Odyssey; Moby-Dick; How to Win Friends and Influence People; The 5 Love Languages; As a Man Thinketh; Oneness; Zen in the Art of Archery; Plato’s Republic; The Way of the Superior Man; Iron John; Aspire; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; The Power Path; Man’s Search for Meaning; and on and on and on and on.

“As long as you do things for the approval of a woman,” Michaela said, “you will never be free. That is a descending hell. And I’ll tell you—when a woman sees that she can bend you, she loses trust in you. We need you to be solid; we need your ‘yes’ to be a yes, and your ‘no’ to be a no. As long as you are twisting and contorting and selling yourself out for the affection of others, you will always be untrustworthy.”

Her curriculum centered on the idea of becoming a Freestanding Man. Essentially, a Freestanding Man is self-aware, self-reliant, self-motivated, self-confident, and utterly unswayed by people’s approval or disapproval. He knows who he is, he knows what he wants. And because of this, he surrenders his considerable gifts into the service of others. “You have to sensitize to your own inner landscape and map out the terrain of who you really are, your true desires and true needs,” Michaela said. “When someone asks how you feel, don’t just throw out a Fluffy answer—think about it. Narrate your feelings, at least internally.”

On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross; The Tibetan Book ofLiving and Dying by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche; Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom; The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.