Will Smith Speech: How to Face Fear
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Will Smith Quote:
“Money and success don’t change people; they merely amplify what is already there.” Will Smith
Will Smith full TRANSCRIPT:
“How much is fear play into preventing us from grasping perspective, though?
Oh no! Fear is everything. Yeah, like if there is if there was one concept that I would suggest to people to take a daily confrontation with, it’s fear. The problem with fear is that it lies, right.
So, fear tells you, “Hey, you know, if you say that to that girl she’s going to know she has you, you know, and she’ll never really be attracted to you if she knows how much you attracted to her. Don’t say that, no! How we get her is when she walks by, ignore her.” You know, fear tells you dumb shit like that. Okay, you know.
So, for me, the daily confrontation with fear has become a real practice for me since about three years ago. I went skydiving in Dubai, right! As skydiving, skydiving is a really interesting confront with fear, right.
So, I got to stand up. So, all your friends… What happens you go out, how you… Oh sorry, drop my thing… So, what happens is you go out the night before and you-you know. You take a drink with your friends and somebody says, “Yeah! We should go skydiving tomorrow.” And you go, “Yeah, we’ll go skydiving tomorrow.” Yeah, yeah! Yeah, right? And you go home by yourself, you like, “hmm…” You like, “Well, yeah.” I mean, they were drunk too, right? So, maybe they not, maybe-maybe, I mean. We don’t have to go. We don’t have to do it.
So then, that night you’re laying in your bed and you just keep “hmm” and you’re terrified. You keep imagining over and over again jumping out of an airplane, and you can’t figure out why you would do that, right! And you’re laying there you have the worst night’s sleep of your life but you still have the hope that your friends were drunk, right. So, you wake up the next day. You go, you know, down. You say where you were going to meet and everybody’s there. You’re like, “Oh shit!” Alright, alright. Cool, cool, cool, cool, right!
So, you get in the van and you don’t know that your friends have the same night that you had cuz they’re pretended like they didn’t it. Like, “Yeah, man! My uncle’s a Navy SEAL and, you know, this is going to be great. I’ve been looking forward to this.” You like, “Oh my god! Oh my god!” And your stomach is terrible. You can’t eat and everything but you don’t want to be the only funk who doesn’t jump out of this airplane. So, you get there and then you have the safety brief. And you’re standing there and the guys will tell you what the chute doesn’t open what’s going to happen is, you’re doing… What…Would…What could happen?
The chute, the chute would open, right? So, you do a thing and what you do is your first jump you’re attached to a guy who is going, you know, he’s going to walk you out. So, you go and you get there, and there’s an airplane and nobody’s stopping. Everybody’s still going. So, you get onto the airplane and you’re sitting there, and, you know, it’s extra because you’re sitting on some dude’s lap, some stranger you sit on his lap. And it’s all you know. You got trying to make small talk, “Yeah man!” So, you-you’ve been jumping with people all the time. Right. You know.
So, and then you just want to make sure, “You got, you got kids, right? You got people you need to see, right?” Just want to make sure he’s serious, right. So, you get in there. So, everything’s normal. So, you fly and you go up, you go up, you go up, you go up to 14,000 feet, and you notice there’s a light: It’s red, and it’s yellow and green. Right. So right now, the lights red. So, then you start thinking at some point the lights going to go green because you don’t know what’s going to happen, right. And you wait, and it goes yellow, and the light goes green, and somebody opens the door and at that moment, you realize you’ve never been in a freaking airplane with the door open. Right! Terror!!! Oh sorry, I spit… Oh sorry… Terror! Terror! Terror! Terror! Right!
So, you go and then, you know, if you’re, if you were smart you sat in the back, so you don’t go first, right. And then, people start going out of the airplane, and you go, and the guy walks you up to the end of the thing and you’re standing and your toes are on the edge, and you’re looking out down to death. And they say, “On three!” And they say, “One, two…” And he pushes you on two because people grab on three, right. And you go… And you fall out of the airplane and in one second you realize that it’s the most blissful experience of your life. You’re flying, right. It doesn’t feel like falling, right. It’s like that you, actually, are kind of held a little bit by the wind and then, you start, and you start falling, you falling, and you, there’s zero fear.
You realize that the point of maximum danger is the point of minimum fear. It’s bliss! It’s bliss! And you’re flying…. And you’re doing it… And then 20 seconds, 25 seconds, 40 seconds, and you have enough time to just kind of like, “Ah! That’s that building I saw that morning…Oh, I can see the ocean…” Right? You start doing all of that, and the lesson for me was: Why were you scared in your bed the night before? Why did you…what do you need that fear for? Just don’t go! Why are you scared in your bed 16 hours before? You jump? Why are you scared in the car? Why could you not enjoy breakfast? What would…What would you need that? Fear is…Fear of what?
You’re now where to even near to the airplane. Everything is up to the stepping out. There’s actually no reason to be scared! It only just ruins your day. You don’t have to jump. And then, at that moment all of a sudden where you should be terrified is the most blissful experience of your life, and God placed the best things in life on the other side of Terror. On the other side of your maximum fear or all of the best things in life. You know, so that was…oh, sorry. So, that was, yeah, that was, that was my experience with skydiving and fear. All right, all right. So, practically speaking… But, I didn’t like that take, I’m gonna do it again. Back to the top. I can sell that better. I can sell that better.
When did you decide to do something like that? Like, how does it work practically? Do you call your wife and be like, “I might be dead tomorrow.” Right. No, but that’s what… I never… Just promise…
Yeah, I made a drunk promise, yeah. How about this, so I jumped I had such a mystical powerful spiritual experience I flew home and got my sons, and I went back and ten days later my son’s jumped. Right. Now, that was a little different… …that makes me spit… Because I’m scared I’m scared, right. So, it was one… So, Jayden went first, right. Jayden wants to do everything first. So, I’m sitting there and I’m like, “Yeah, my sons are going to have this crazy experience.” And then Jayden went out of the airplane, I was like, “hmm…”
Then my oldest son Trey goes up and he goes out of the airplane, and I was like, “This could potentially be the worst display of African-American parenting in history”. I was like, both my sons just fell out of an airplane. Jump…jump, right! Because I told them to and that…but again the fear again. I was like, “Oh my god”. So, I told the dude. I was like, “Listen! I want to see them go out but I also want to see them land.” And he’s like, “No, it’s cool”. So, this time we went out and we did the straight bullet. And I just went straight down, past them, right. Are you good? Right. Did the bullet straight past, pull the chute late…Oh, sorry. It makes me spit… I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Pulled the chute late, landed and then video them coming down. But it was like, they had the same thing, the same experience with the fear but that I’m telling you the confrontation with fear is an absolutely magical way of facing the things we have to do in this life. You know, forget security live for experience.
So, with that, every morning when I get out of the bed, you know, I haven’t fixed everything in the world yet so there’s always something to do, and in this film, I read an interesting quote…the Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha, he said that “Good people have to get out of the bed every day and try to empty the ocean with a ladle”. Right. And I thought that was, you know, I knew that was profound and I paused for a second, and I said, “All right, what the hell is a ladle? Right? Right? So there, you know, I just…I touched it on my iPad, what’s ladle? Oh! It’s like a big spoon…a big spoon, okay. Like a soup spoon, yeah. A soup spoon. I was like, “Why your soup spoon”.
So, trying to empty the ocean with a soup spoon, you know, as the mentality of how you wake up every day to try to do good in the world. So, for me I’m…uh…I’m really driven by continually trying to elevate my, elevate my mind and elevate my spirit, and care for my body and to be able to love as many people as effectively as possible with this mystery of life that I’ve been given.
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Will Smith
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