Name: Will
Rating: 3.8 (270 reviews)
Author: Will Smith with Mark Manson

What’s in it for me? Get to know the real Will Smith

How do you build a wall? When Will Smith was a boy, he learned the hard way.

The wall by his father’s shop was crumbling. Will’s father was a contractor back then, so he wasn’t going to hire anyone to fix it. He put Will and his brother, Harry, on the job instead.

That summer went slowly. It was a long wall: 20 feet. The task seemed endless. They’d never get it done, Will said.

His father marched over and told him to forget the wall. There is no wall, he said. All you have to do is think about the brick in your hand. You add the cement and then you lay it down, perfectly. And then you take another brick and do the same with that one too.

Building a wall and building a life are surprisingly similar. Welcome to the Blink to Will Smith’s memoir. Fittingly enough, it’s called Will. Oprah called it the best memoir she has read in her lifetime.

Obviously, we don’t have enough space to cover everything about Will’s life. So, instead, we’ll cover seven defining moments of his life. By the end, you won’t have the full, detailed picture. But you will have a little mosaic – a mosaic of moments. So let’s begin our journey. It all starts in – you guessed it – West Philadelphia.

Will’s Future

It’s the year 1985, we’re in Philly – more specifically, in the leafy, middle-class neighborhood of Wynnefield. Will is just returning from school. He’s seventeen years old.

As he enters the house, he senses that something is wrong. Sure enough, his mom’s at the kitchen table, with a look somewhere between sadness and anger on her face.

That’s unusual. With his father, trouble’s never been far away. There’s no pleasing the man. A hard-drinking disciplinarian with a mean streak, he’s always been moody and unpredictable. But with Mom, it’s different. They’ve never not been on the same page. Until now.

Will is no scholar, but he’s done well in school so far – well enough to be able to get into a good college. That means everything to his mother.

What you have to know about Mom is that she came up in a poor family in a bad neighborhood during hard times. College saved her. It’s what put her in this comfortable brick house in leafy, middle-class neighborhood of Wynnefield. Times have changed, sure, but the world’s still a brutal place – especially for a young Black man like her son. He has to go to college. That’s her truth.

But Will’s grades have started to slip. And that, he assumes, explains the look on her face.

A while back, Will’s cousin introduced him to hip-hop. He’s been rapping ever since – hippity-hopping around, as his Mom says. Right now, he’s teamed up with a disk-jockey named Jeff Townes. They call themselves Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and they’ve been making waves – first in Philly, then in New York. Hip-hop’s still new, but everyone in the scene knows it’s the next big thing. And they’re riding the wave. There’s even talk of a record deal.

But hip-hop, Mom says, isn’t a career. It’s a hobby. He can rap but he can’t be a rapper. That’s when Will says it – the thing that’ll break her heart. He doesn’t want to go to college.

It’s a stalemate. Neither Mom nor son backs down.

Enter Daddio. For Mom, it’s education that matters. For her husband, it’s hard work. They’re different like that. She chooses words with care, speaking with academic finesse. Daddio, though, is a poet of profanity. Will remembers how he once called a man – and please excuse his French – “dirty rat, cocksuckin’, low-down, mangy pig fucker.”

On hip-hop, though, they see eye to eye: college is a safer bet than a music career.

But there’s an artist underneath the hard exterior of Daddio. Thing is, this cussing old soldier didn’t dream of owning the ice-packing business that puts food on the Smiths’ table. He wanted to be a photographer. But his parents made him sell his camera. Art, they said, wasn’t “practical.”

So Daddio agrees. Will can pursue his music career – with one condition: if Will doesn’t succeed in a year, he’s going to college.

The Turnaround

Benny Medina is the real-life Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He wasn’t born and raised in West Philadelphia, but in Watts, Los Angeles, a Black and Hispanic neighborhood that’s also one of the city’s poorest.

After his mother’s death, he ended up living with a wealthy white family in Bel-Air. He went into showbiz and became one of LA’s best-known TV producers.

Father and Son

Will’s second son, Jaden, was born in 1998. He followed his father into movies when he was 12, starring in The Karate Kid alongside Jackie Chan.

Will produced the movie, and he was a relentless taskmaster. Everything had to be just right – especially with his son’s performances. Jaden’s scenes were endlessly reshot. And just when it looked like the project was reaching its conclusion, Will extended filming in China by three months.

Saying Goodbye

One of the most important ideas in filmmaking is that it’s easier to craft compelling narratives when you start at the end. In other words, you’ve got to know your ending.

It’s like the punchline to a joke. If you know the conclusion, you also know what kind of details and clues you need to plant along the way. Everything serves a purpose; everything leads somewhere.

Kernaussagen in Will

Über den Autor

Will Smith is an actor, producer and musician. He is a two-time Academy Award nominee and a Grammy Award and NAACP award winner. His career spans the worlds of music, TV, and film. He’s best known for his roles in films like Bad Boys, Independence Day, Men in Black, and Aladdin.

Mark Manson is the New York Times best-selling author of Everything is F*cked and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. His books have sold over 12 million copies worldwide.