Will Smith by Greg Skidmore
Multitalented Will Smith has been an ultra-successful rapper, TV-sitcom star and movie sensation… just not all at once. He started rapping at the age of 12, and earned the monker “Prince” because of his classy ability of get out of scrapes on the streets of Philadelphia. As half of “Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince”, he snagged two Grammys® and had best-selling albums with his brand of less aggressive (and PG-rated) music. His persona inspired the hit NBC TV series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Smith turned down a scholarship to MIT to pursue his TV career. It wasn’t the last time he’d make the decision to walk away from one promising path in order to focus completely on another. Ironically, depicting his rap-star character on the series, which ran six seasons, began to spell the end of his music career. While on the show, he started getting interested in movies, and, deciding that what he wanted most was success in that arena, made the conscious choice to retire as a musician to pursue film full-time. The strategy worked: Smith figured in a raft of successful movies such as Six Degrees of Separation, Independence Day, Men in Black, Bad Boys, Wild Wild West, and Ali, for which he garnered his first Oscar® nomination (the second came in 2007 for In Pursuit Of Happyness). While he’s concentrated on movies, he still has plenty of variety, lending his producing talents to the Robert De Niro/Eddie Murphy starrer Showtime (2002), voicing a cartoon fish in Shark Tale, cutting his romantic comedy chops on Hitch (2005) and blasting off into sci-fi with I, Robot, the Men in Black series and I Am Legend (2007). Proving that doing one thing at a time can be both a smart strategy and a way of using a lot of your talents.
This inspiring video is well worth 10 minutes of your time. In it, Will Smith discusses his philosophy of commitment to your ideas, your craft and the truth. He discusses focus specifically about 8:15 into the video.
