MBA2018 Must Read: Will by Will Smith and Mark Manson

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Whether you're a Will Smith fan or not, you have to agree that he's achieved a lot in his life and in his career despite coming from very humble beginnings. So it takes some level of character and there's got to be some strategies and there's got to be some mindset involved to be able to pull yourself out of a situation and achieve some of the highest levels of success in both his career in acting, in film and music, as well as business. So I'm a big believer in taking what's good and leaving what maybe you don't agree with or maybe you don't like. But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. There's a lot of good in this book. First of all, this is a big book, okay? It's a long book. And you prefer an audiobook. This makes a great audiobook because it's a biography, it's storytelling. And I picked it up on Audible and found it to be a very easy listen. Will Smith narrates the book himself. He starts this book with a story, a story about a wall. A wall his father is making them build brick by brick in the height of the summer heat in Philadelphia. And he shares how frustrated he was building this wall and he just felt like it was never going to get built. It was going to. I don't see a wall. I'm working hard day in and day out, I'm losing out on free time. Until his father told him, stop focusing on the wall and just focus on the brick that you're trying to lay right now. Just try to put that brick on top of the other brick perfectly. He started to see the difference between tasks that feel impossible and a task that feels doable in a mere matter of seconds, really. And he realized it's just a matter of perspective. No matter what challenges you're going through in life, or in your business for that matter, there's always going to be another brick you're going to have to lay. He also learned that when you look at business, you look at life. When you look at big goals, it can get daunting, it can get overwhelming. When you think about, I got to create my business, I got to create my website, I got to create this email sequence, when really you just got to break it down to micro goals. You gotta break it down to the brick level. And if you just focus on the micro goals step by step, lay that brick, lay that brick, lay that brick. Before you know it, that big task, that big daunting thing you have to do will be completed. And it's essential to do that because otherwise you're gonna get demotivated, you're going to give up. And by just focusing on the brick, you know, the micro steps of every task that you have to do, it allows you to, to just get momentum and get going. Now, the chapters in this book are mainly one word titles. So chapter one is all about fear and how fear dictated a lot of his decisions as a child and growing up and how he built coping mechanisms to deal with this fear. One of them was being a people pleaser and being an entertainer and being a comedian and trying to lighten the mood so that the wrath of whoever does not lay upon him. That's why being an actor or an entertainer comes natural to him, because he's been doing it since he was a child to kind of mitigate any drama in the family, whether it's from his father or his siblings or whatever it was. Also in this chapter, he touches on the concept of leadership a bit. A saying that his father would always say to him, and that is, if two people are in charge, everyone dies. And he's referring to, you know, situations in the military, in combat. You got to have one leader, you got to have people following along. There's got to be one direction. Once there's kind of mutiny, or maybe somebody else thinks they're the leader or is defying the leader or maybe even creating some drama for him or her. It makes accomplishing any mission very hard. Now, what I take from this is that this can be true, and it's certainly true in business. You have to have a leader in business. You gotta be a captain of the ship where they're ultimately responsible and they're the ones to make the final decisions. It doesn't mean they don't listen and consider and take in advice from their leader, from their management, from the other people that run the business with them, other founders. The point here is that being a leader in most cases in business is not really like some fun privilege. It's a burden, it's a responsibility. But in that responsibility, they have to make the decisions based on the advice they get from the team. But people are looking to them to make those decisions, the final decision, and to move them in that direction. I'm going to fast forward to chapter four, where he discusses the concept of power and how he learned a lot of lessons when it came to power and having power and using it for good in his life. When he was in high school and he was becoming a great rapper, and he would go through these rap battles in high school, he learned that most rappers were very serious and they were very harsh and very hardcore. And he wanted to differentiate himself and he wanted to have, like, an extra superpower to be anybody in a rap battle. And he realized that when it comes to battling or even debate, you can't be funny. Funny is kind of the ultimate superpower. It disempowers the other person. People laugh at whoever is delivering the joke, and they get all the power through the laughter. And therefore, he became one of the funniest rappers of his era. And he used that power and that funniness throughout his career to gain credibility, to gain momentum, to be able to get more opportunities as an actor, and also negotiating deals as a business person. He also talks about the power of confidence. And confidence doesn't come from nowhere. If you feel not so confident in an area in your business, in your life, one of the easiest ways to get confident is to become proficient in it, to learn about it, to research, to read a book about it. Once you understand something, once you have a good grasp on something, you feel strong about it, and you no longer feel like it's a weakness. In a later chapter, he talks about ignorance and the cost of ignorance, not Knowing something and just taking action can cost you a lot of time and money and pain. He gives a lot of life examples here. He says, life is a test, and it's our job to find the lessons in that test. We're going to be tested. That's guaranteed. You're going to be tested in your business. You're going to have struggles, you're going to have challenges, you're going to have things from outside of your control come in and test you and your business. Your job is to learn from it, to take the lessons and become better, become stronger, wiser, and more equipped for the future. In the chapter Pain, he talks about how a lot of pain in life can result in you making a major change in your life. Sometimes when you're in so much pain, you say, I've had it. I got to do something different. This is why Tony Robbins says there are two things that motivate us to take action. It's either inspiration or desperation. And often it's the latter. Right? We get desperate. We get a sense of, like, anything can be better than this. I could definitely attest to that. This is why I left my career in teaching. I got to that point where I said, you know, I need to take control, I want to change. I got frustrated. So he says, use these opportunities, because that next step, that next chapter in your life, can make everything just turn around, can really pivot your life into a different stratosphere. And he experienced this when he actually just moved City. He says choosing the city you live in is just as important as choosing your life partner. There's an energy, there's a vibe, there's a connection that you have to your environment that will help harness the power of whatever you're trying to achieve, or it's going to make it harder for you to achieve it. Make sure your environment helps you achieve your goals and not the other way around. In the following chapter, Destruction, he gets into the idea that sometimes you're going to lose in life, in business, in your career, and there's nothing you can do about it. Sometimes it's out of your control. You're going to take the L. He says it's respectable to lose to the universe. It's a tragedy to lose to yourself, meaning that you got to do everything you can try everything, you can give your all, your best, and if you still lose, if you still come up short, that's fine. But if you don't give it your all and you have what ifs, that's where you lose. That's A tragedy in his book. In chapter 10, Alchemy, he talks about how the universe is not logical. In his opinion, things are just not logical. They don't plan out or pan out, I should say the way you would imagine. He says, instead, see the world as magical. A major aspect of pain and mental anguish we experience as humans is that our mind seeks and often demands logic. Right. I need to understand what's going on. We want logic and order from the world. Our minds desperately want things just to add up. But he says the rules of logic don't apply to the laws of possibility. The universe functions under the laws of magic, in his opinion. He says that sometimes things are unexplainable, sometimes things happen in mysterious ways. In this chapter, he talks about Quincy Jones, the famous producer, musician, basically produced anybody and everybody who has major success. And he talks about when somebody just does what they're good at, naturally good at, they become magical. And the example he gives through story after story is Quincy Jones. And I'm going to leave you to explore those stories yourself because they're absolutely magical. One of my favorite chapters in this book is called Adaptation. He says change can be scary, but it's utterly unavoidable. It's the only thing that's guaranteed in the world that things will change, whether it's a small change or a major change. He says if you're unable or unwilling to pivot and adapt yourself to the fluctuating tides of life, you'll just not enjoy being on Earth. Life is really going to be hard for you. The capacity to adjust and to improvise is arguably the single most crucial and unique thing that humans do. We're very adaptable, and if we don't continue to adapt, depending on our circumstances, our environment, what's going on in the market and our business, what's going on with our team, our employees, all that kind of stuff, we're asking for trouble.

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It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico guys, before I wrap up today's must read episode on Will by Will Smith and Mark Manson. I touched on barely half of the chapters that is covered in this book. I want to give you my overall impressions, my closing thoughts as well as just my general Take this book. First of all, this is a well delivered autobiography. It's incredibly honest and I find that autobiographies that are like that are a page turner. They're super, super interesting to read and to enjoy. It kind of reminded me of Open by Andre Agassiz, how raw and honest it was. It also was kind of entertaining because, you know, I would say Will Smith is in my generation. He's a bit older than me, but some of the pop culture references he references as he goes through his life were kind of entertaining and nostalgic. Not only was his story captivating from start to finish, but his insights, his successes in his career in different areas, not just in acting and music, but also how he navigated his relationships, how he perceived love and gave love and what it all meant to him was quite profound. Like I mentioned, he's quite vulnerable in the book and he shares a lot of some really embarrassing struggles, but you learn a ton of lessons along the way. I would recommend reading this book because rarely do people open up to this extent where they're just laying all the cards on the table. Some really embarrassing stuff in this book that most people wouldn't share, but in him sharing it, you learn a ton of lessons. You ask a bunch of thought provoking questions about yourself as you're reading this, but my ultimate takeaway from this book, and there's so many of them, but this is the one that really hit home and that's nobody can make you happy. You're 100% responsible for your own happiness. And when I say no one can make you happy, you may want to also include no other thing can make you happy, including your business. Sometimes we work so hard on our business and our emotions and how we feel today is all dictated by how well the business is going, how the numbers look. Don't fall for that trap. Your business is a means to an end, to fulfill you, to give you joy, to give you adventure, to sustain you, to give you the lifestyle you're looking for. It's not the other way around. The business doesn't dictate your happiness. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. I recommend you pick up this book. It's worth reading and again, the audible version is really, really easy to listen to. There's some really cool effects they do with music and sound effects that I thought were subtle but quite valuable in terms of adding some production value to the experience of listening to the book. If you love today's episode, hit subscribe and leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast app. We're on Spotify, we're on Stitcher Radio. We're on Apple Podcasts, we're on Overcast, we're on Himalaya. We're on every single podcast app. Just search the $100 or you're already on there right now. So hit subscribe or follow to make sure you get the next episode automatically. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There's a great saying that I heard from Tony Robbins that says success leaves clues. Any success you see anybody have success in any area in life, there's something to learn. Actors, athletes, mathematicians, politicians, whatever it is, you don't have to agree with everybody. You don't have to love that person. But if they have some level of success in what they do, they can share through their journey, through their story, some of the breadcrumbs, how they got there, and you can take that on and add it to your journey. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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