Face Fear
Interviewer: How much does fear play into preventing us from grasping perspective, though? Will Smith: Oh, no, fear is everything. Yeah, like, if there's, 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 gonna know she has you know and she'll never really be attracted to you
If she knows how much you attracted to her." Yeah. "Don't say that, no. How we get her is when she walks by, ignore her."
Right. Right, it's a You know? It's like little puppet on your shoulder. Fear tells you dumb shit like that, right?
You know? So, yeah, for me, the daily confrontation, with fear has become a real practice for me since about three years ago. I went, I went skydiving in Dubai, right? And skydiving is a really interesting confront with fear, right?
So I Trust. I gotta stand up. I'm sorry, I gotta stand up.
I gotta stand up. All right. So all your friends, what happens, you go Hold up. How you. Oh, sorry.
I dropped my thing. Yeah. So what happens is you go out the night before and 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." And you go, "Yeah." And everybody goes, "Yeah," right? And you go home by.
You by yourself, you're like, "Mm." Right? You're like, "Well, I mean, they was drunk, too." Right? "So maybe they not, maybe they 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.
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, and 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, and you go, you know, down, and you stay where you were gonna meet, and everybody's there.
And you're like, "Oh, shit. " "All right, all right. Cool, cool."
Right? So you get in the van, and you don't know that your friends had the same night that you had, 'cause they're pretending like they didn't. They're like, "Yeah, man, my uncle's a Navy SEAL, and you know this is gonna be great.
I've been looking forward to this." And you're like, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God." And your stomach is terrible.
You can't eat and everything, but you don't wanna be the only punk 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 guy's gonna tell you, "Well, if the chute doesn't open, what's gonna happen is you're doing."
You, "Well, why the hell. Why, what could happen?" "That the chute wouldn't open," right?
So you do a thing, and what you do is your first jump, you're attached to a guy who is you know, he's gonna 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, 'cause you're sitting on some dude's lap, some stranger.
You're sitting on his lap. And it's like, you know, you trying to make small talk. "Yeah, man, you." "So you do, you be, you be jumping with people all the time, huh?
You." Right? You know. So and then you just wanna make sure, "Yo, you got, you got kids, right? You got people you need to see."
Right? You just wanna 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, and 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 light's red. So then you start thinking, at some point, the light's gonna go green, and but you don't know what's gonna happen, right?
And you wait, and it goes yellow, and the light goes green, and somebody opens the door. And in that moment, you realize you've never been in a fricking airplane with the door open. Right? Terror. Oh, sorry, I'm spitting.
I'm Oh, sorry. No, 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? Right? And you go, "Ahhh." 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 the, you actually are kinda held a little bit by the wind. And then you start, and you start falling, you're falling, and you.
There's zero fear. You realize at the point of maximum danger is the point of minimum fear. It's bliss. It's bliss. And you're flying. Right?
And you're doing that, and then 20 seconds, 25 seconds, 40 seconds, and you have enough time to just kind of be like, "Oh, shit, that's that building. I saw like that one." "Oh, you 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 did you need to. The fear is fear of what? You're nowhere even near the airplane.
Everything up to the stepping out, there's actually no reason to be scared. It only just ruins your day. You're, you don't have to jump.
And then in 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 are all of the best things in life.
You know? Mm-hmm. So that that. Sorry. So No, it's good. That was a, yeah, that No.
That was my experience with skydiving and fear. All right. All right. So practically 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 it better. Hold on. Interviewer: When you decide to do something like Yeah. Like, how does it work practically?
Do you call your wife and be like, "I might be dead tomorrow"? Will Smith: Right. No, but that'But I made a drunk promise. You know what? That's.
Yeah, I made a drunk promise, yeah. Here, how about this? So I jumped. I had such a mystical, powerful, spiritual experience.
Mm-hmm. I flew home and got my sons, and I went back, and 10 days later, my sons jumped, right? Yeah. Now, that was a little different. Oh, see, that makes me stand up, right?
'Cause I'm scared. I'm scared, right? So it was one. So Jaden went first, right?
Jaden wants to do everything first. So I'm sitting there and I'm like, "Yeah, my sons are gonna have this crazy experience." And then Jaden went out of the airplane, and 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."
Right? I was like, "Both my sons just fell out of an airplane." Jumped. Right? Jumped. Jumped. Right. Because I told them to.
Yeah. And then, but again, the fear again. I was like, "Oh my God." So I told the dude, I was like, "Listen, I wanna see them go out, but I also wanna 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. Oh. Right? I was like.
And he's like, "you're good." Right, did the bullet straight past, pulled the chute late. Oh, sorry, this makes me spit.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Pulled the chute late, landed, and then videoed them coming down. But it was like they had the same thing, the same experience with the fear.
But Yeah. That, I'm telling you the confrontation with fear is an absolute, magical way of facing the things we have to do in this life, you know? Forget security. Live for experience, right?
So with that, every morning when I get out of the bed, you know, I the, I haven't fixed everything in the world yet, so there's always something to do. Yeah. And in this film, I read a, an interesting quote, the, Siddhartha, Gautama, the Buddha.
Mm. He said, that, good people have to get out of the bed every day and try to empty the ocean with a ladle. Mm-hmm. 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 then, you know, I just, I touched it on my iPad. It's ladle. Oh, it's like a big spoon.
A big spoon. Okay. As we say, silly. It's like a soup spoon.
Yeah. It's like a soup spoon. I was like, "Why a 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 Yeah.
In the world. So for me, 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.
