REVIEW | Will by Will Smith

AUTHOR: Will Smith, Mark Manson

GENRE: NONFICTION

ISBN: 1984877925

FIRST PUBLISHED: Nov 9th, 2021

PAGES: 418 PAGES

EDITION LANGUAGE: English

★★★

This is Will Smith’s biography that’s very hard for me to process. On one hand, it fulfilled its mission being a biography and covers almost every aspect of Will Smith’s life, who I didn’t really know much about, in spite he’s a very successful actor. His personality shows through every page (or every minute - since I listened to the audiobook) of the book. But on the other hand, this book makes me so stressed that I have to put it down for a long time, hence why I finished this book in January when I started in early December.

Starting from Will Smith’s childhood, the book narrated many events that influenced Will Smith as a person and really makes readers understand why he is who he is today.

Growing up in an abusive family, Will Smith started to adopt humor as one of his defense mechanisms and developed a fascinating imagination that helped him in difficult situations. He believes if he can make people laugh, everything will be okay, and this eventually led to the success of his acting career and how he interact with people around him well after he became an adult.

I liked how he wasn’t self-pity and was able to turn some of his heavy childhood experiences into different lessons and analyzed their impact on him. He reflected on things, and you can feel that he genuinely tries to learn the maximum amount of lessons from each event. Which is great for personal growth, and which is also why he was able to become and maintain success for a very long time.

This is a double edge sword that makes the book seems too stressful. Throughout his life, you can see his desire for success and the layers and layers of pressure he added to himself. And the expectations were just so heavy. Maybe I have a low tolerant of “success-talks”, but in the end, I felt pressured too. His wording makes you feel like you are wasting your life if you don’t work as hard as he did. What comes worse - he has expectations for others as well. Not others’ performance, but he needed a very high quality of reactions from people around him. So that he can feel recognized and loved.

On the bright side, he noticed that himself too. He’s consistently reflected on his flaws and wasn’t shy away from calling himself out. But the frustrating thing is he never really reflects on it. So throughout the book, you see him repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Eventually, it became too much for me to read (listen).

This is also a very self-centered book. Of course, it’s the nature of a biography, but I don’t think it’s necessary to repeat himself as “the biggest movie star” a hundred times in the same chapter. I understand he wanted to make a point about hard work, but it’s still too much for me.

However, this book was also entertaining because being Will Smith, he has the ability to enlighten the mood and make people feel happy. His writing was humorous, and because I listened to this on audio, I was also entertained by the top-tier performance of audiobooks. Also, the audiobook includes many clips from his albums or things he referenced, so I highly recommend the audiobook if you are interested in this book.