Years ago, my partner at the time and I did a meeting to really just get to know each better and discussed random questions on personal views with each other.
We asked each other who the most successful person alive was and most successful in history.
History, we both agreed in about 30 seconds that the answer was Leonardo Da Vinci.
Alive today, we gave it to Will Smith.
Will Smith grew up in a regular middle class background, where he had very high grades in school to the point Carnegie Mellon, which was his mothers alma mater was called his safety school.
Had MIT and several other top ten colleges reach out to him to apply with his guidance counsellor saying he had a good chance, only to decide not to go to college and pursue music.
Did that and partnering with DJ Jazzy Jeff, he ended up a completely self made multi millionaire before age 25.
Made millions and ended up 2.8 million in debt to the IRS before the year 1990, due to failure to pay taxes and to quote him “I knew I had to, but didn’t want to”.
At the time, the IRS had an 11% interest rate, so his repayment plan was going to be about 5 million dollars.
Instead, his DJ Jazzy convinced Will Smith who never acted before to do a little show called Fresh Prince and the IRS agreed to take 30% of the earnings the first three seasons instead of a normal repayment.
The guy only did acting due to an IRS debt and ended up excelling at it so much he’d make it the primary point in his career, make 350 million dollars doing it and last night, win an Oscar for it on his third nomination.
In the process, he lived one of the cleanest life’s anyone in Hollywood has had.
His son got into acting and ended up co-founding a water company valued at over 100 million today.
His family life being a little weird undeniably seems better put together over most in media.
The guy is genuinely an awesome dude.
For the Chris Rock thing, it was pretty stupid, but it’s hard to call anything an assault when someone is laughing before, during and after it happens and jokes about it seconds later.
Chris Rock didn’t get scared for life.
Chris Rock clearly didn’t care.
Chris Rock won’t need to get emotional counselling.
He made a pretty screwed up joke and ended up getting material for his stand up act the next five years.
And why write this?
I feel people are a little too cancel hungry, where they see Will Smith who just had a major win after a 30+ year acting career and over a fairly harmless incident want to see him charged for assault, mostly due to it being fun for them.
So well, stupid moment, but last time people wanted Will Smith arrested, it resulted in him launching a centi million dollar acting career, so let’s see where this takes him.