Will

by Will Smith

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.

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?

Mom-Mom would often say that knowledge was the only thing that the world couldn’t take away from you. And she only cared about three things: education, education, and education.

Mom-Mom is quiet and reserved; not because she’s shy or intimidated, but because she “only speaks when it improves on silence.”

My full name is Willard Carroll Smith II—not Junior. Daddio would always correct people: “Hey! He ain’t no mutherfuckin’ Junior.” He felt like calling me “Junior” diminished both of us.

“Oh, you’re such a man! You think that hitting a woman makes you a man, huh?” He hit her again, knocking her to the ground. She stood right back up, looked him in the eye, and calmly said, “Hit me all you want, but you can never hurt me.” I have never forgotten that. The idea that he could hit her body but somehow she was in control of what “hurt” her? I wanted to be strong like that.

In acting, understanding a character’s fears is a critical part of understanding his or her psyche. The fears create desires and the desires precipitate actions. These repetitive actions and predictable responses are the building blocks of great cinematic characters. It’s pretty much the same in real life. Something bad happens to us, and we decide we’re never going to let that happen again. But in order to prevent it, we have to be a certain way. We choose the behaviors that we believe will deliver safety, stability, and love. And we repeat them, over and over again. In the movies, we call it a character; in real life, we call it personality. How we decide to respond to our fears, that is the person we become. I decided to be funny.

And I talked a lot—probably too much. But, most important, I had a wild and vivid imagination, a fantasy life that was much broader and lasted way longer than most children. Whereas when most kids just played around with plastic army men, Nerf balls, and toy guns, I would construct elaborate fantasy scenarios and then get lost in them.

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.”

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.

Psychologists have written about how our relationship with our parents in childhood and early adolescence creates our “map” for understanding love in adulthood. When we interact with our parents as children, some behaviors and attitudes win us attention and affection and other behaviors and attitudes cause us to feel abandoned, unsafe, and unloved. The behaviors and attitudes that win us affection often come to define what we understand as love.

The concepts of love and performance became fused in my mind. Love became something earned by saying and doing the right things. In my mind, great performances got you love; bad performances left you abandoned and alone. An exquisite performance secured affection. But if you sucked, you sucked by your damn self.

Throughout my life, I have been haunted by an agonizing sense that I am failing the women I love. Over the years, in my romantic relationships, I would always do too much. Coddling, overprotecting, desperately trying to please them, even when they were totally fine. This insatiable desire to please manifested as an exhausting neediness. To me, love was a performance, so if you weren’t clapping, I was failing. To succeed in love, the ones you care for must constantly applaud. Spoiler alert: This is not a way to have healthy relationships.

Except J.R. Ewing was hella rich. People give you a whole lot more leeway when your family compound has a name. That blew my mind.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Gigi’s words. She was right—I was always talking, always joking—I never shut up. I talked not because I had anything particularly important to say, but because I was afraid. It began to dawn on me that my overcompensation and fake bravado were really just another, more insidious, manifestation of the coward.

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.” Rapping didn’t just win me the approval I desperately craved from my peers; it gave me a sense of power. But I knew it was fleeting; it demanded my constant attention and nurturing. I knew I was good, but I also knew that I had to work. It wasn’t going to just come to me. I had to go get it.

My work ethic and constant pushing slowly drove a wedge between me and the group. They resented me for always bugging them and ruining what to them was just supposed to be a fun hobby. I resented them for not putting the effort in to make this thing as good as it could possibly be. I remember being at rehearsals with them and finding myself barking out a Daddio axiom: “Ninety-nine percent is the same as zero!”

There’s a great concept from Jim Rohn: “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.

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.

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.”

As the doors began to close, I caught eyes with Gigi. She smiled that smile I’d seen in Resurrection Baptist Church every single Sunday of my life. “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.”

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.

So, even when you haven’t the slightest clue what you’re doing, you just have to take a deep breath and get on the damn bus.

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.

Heartbreak should be considered a disease—it induces a debilitating state akin to mental illness. The pain I was suffering was so intense I would have preferred to have been stabbed or beaten or have a tooth pulled without Novocain.

My mind at the time still correlated performance with love. The entire basis for my self-esteem was foundationally dependent upon whether my woman was happy. My self-image was inexorably bound up in women’s opinion and approval of me. I figured that since I was not receiving the love I so deeply craved, it had to be because of a deficiency in me as the lead character. If I had performed the role of “boyfriend” better, she wouldn’t have cheated. As you can probably imagine, that bought me a first-class ticket on a bullet train to agony.

The thing about money, sex, and success is that when you don’t have them, you can justify your misery—shit, if I had money, sex, and success, I’d feel great! However misguided that may be, it psychologically permeates as hope. But once you are rich, famous, successful—and you’re still insecure and unhappy—the terrifying thought begins to lurk: Maybe the problem is me. Of course, I dismissed that foolishness quickly. I just needed more money, more women, more Grammys.

Throughout my career, I have seen this pattern over and over again. I have given hundreds of jobs to people, many of whom have ultimately cracked and crumbled under the pressure of the possibilities. As the great Negro poet Charlie Mack once put it, “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. That is why self-destruction is such a terrible crime. It’s hard enough as it is.

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.

I wanted to say, Yeah, man, fuck you, I’m out. But instead, I said, “Yo, man, don’t take that jacket off—trust me, you won’t see it again.”

Quincy used to say, “Things are always impossible, right up until they’re not!”

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 necessary during certain periods of our lives. But a time will come when we must put them aside or die.

I was hungry, focused, and excited about the new life I was being blessed to undertake. But my personal and professional crash and burn had taught me a harsh, universal lesson: Nothing lasts forever. Everything rises and falls—no matter how hot the summer gets, the winter is inevitable. I promised myself I would never get caught sleeping again. That during the good times, I would plant and nurture the seeds of the “next thing.” And if I was truly wise, and attuned to the movements of the industry, I would be able to time the harvest of the next thing impeccably, just before the death of the old thing. In the same way that my music career was scorching hot, then icy cold, I knew the same thing would one day happen in TV. I was about to be on blaze—but one day, I knew I’d be cold again. I asked myself: After television, what would be my next thing? There was only one answer: movies.

It’s amazing how skewed your vision can become when you see the present through the lens of your past. It was a very difficult psychological rehabilitation for us to learn how to put down the snow globe.

It was the only thing that kept my anxieties at bay. If I was going to lose, it was damn sure going to be somebody’s else’s fault.

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.

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.

Clarity of mission is a powerful cornerstone of success. Knowing what you want gives direction to your life—every word, every action, every association, can be accurately chosen and harnessed to precipitate your desired outcome. What you eat, when you sleep, where you go, who you talk to, what you allow them to say to you, who your friends are, can all be corralled and launched toward your wildest dreams.

We had our goal, and the first question we asked was What makes someone a movie star (as opposed to simply an actor)? Movie stars tend to play likeable characters who embody and depict the best of humanity: courage, ingenuity, success against the odds. I loved the idea of being a better person in a movie than I was in real life. I could protect people, I could kill bad things, I could fly, all the women would love me—they have to, it says it right here in the script. I came up with a way to describe what makes a great movie star character: I call it the three Fs of movie stardom: You have to be able to fight, you have to be funny, and you have to be good at sex. Beneath the three Fs are our deepest human yearnings: fighting equates to safety, security, and physical survival. Being funny equates to joy, happiness, and freedom from all negativity. And being good at sex equates to the promise of love. And encompassing these qualities, the biggest movie stars make the biggest movies in the world. Movie stars put asses in seats.

We tend to think of our personalities as fixed and solid. We think of our likes and our dislikes, our beliefs, our nationalities, our political affiliations and religious convictions, our mannerisms, our sexual predilections, et cetera, as set, as us. But the reality is, most of the things that we think of as us are learned habits and patterns, and entirely malleable, and the danger when actors venture out to the far ends of our consciousness is that sometimes we lose the bread crumbs marking our way home. We realize that the characters we play in a film are no different than the characters we play in life. Will Smith is no more “real” than Paul—they’re both characters that were invented, practiced, and performed, reinforced, and refined by friends, loved ones, and the external world. What you think of as your “self” is a fragile construct.

Achieving goals requires strict organization and unwavering discipline. I began to lean more into structure and order, but Sheree was an artist: she cooks by feel, not by recipe; she was much more fluid, intuitive, and less structured. It drove me crazy. 6:17 is not six o’clock.

What is it with these guys and the “right now, today, no paralysis through analysis” shit?

The human mind is a storytelling machine. The creation of narrative is hard-wired into us. What we call “memory” and “imagination” are essentially just stories that we program into our minds as a survival mechanism to protect ourselves and to help us thrive. We are what Jonathan Gottschall called “storytelling animals.” Our minds abhor abstraction—from the beginning of time, humans have used character and story to make sense of the mystery of life. We need our lives to mean something. It is a kind of mental illness if we cannot shape our experiences into a story that gives our existence a sense of purpose.

The fundamental narrative pattern of the hero’s journey is as follows: A hero receives a “call to adventure.” Something happens in his life that forces him to embark upon a journey that takes him into a world of danger and wonder. He faces a series of challenges, tests, and trials; he encounters allies and enemies (maybe even falls in love), all culminating in a “supreme ordeal.” And if he proves himself wise enough, and strong enough, to overcome his internal wounds (traumas), and external obstacles, and survive this near-death ordeal, he comes away with a “treasure”—what Campbell calls the “elixir,” a rare wisdom and insight. He is now empowered to “return home” with “the boon” and do the only thing that makes a human life worth living: help others find their way.