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    “Internal power and confidence are born of insight and proficiency. When you understand something, or you’re good at something, you feel strong, and it makes you feel like you have something to offer. When you have adequately cultivated your unique skills and gifts, then you’re excited about approaching and interacting with the world.”

    Will Smith, Will (Page 69)

      “In order to feel confident and secure, you need to have something to feel confident and secure about.”

      Will Smith, Will (Page 68)

        “Psychologists have written about how our relationship with our parents in childhood and early adolescence creates our ‘map’ for understanding love in adulthood. When we interact with our parents as children, some behaviors and attitudes win us attention and affection and other behaviors and attitudes cause us to feel abandoned, unsafe, and unloved. The behaviors and attitudes that win us affection often come to define what we understand as love.”

        Will Smith, Will (Page 48)

          “Think always of the universe as one living creature, comprising one substance and one soul: how all is absorbed into this one consciousness; how a single impulse governs all its actions; how all things collaborate in all that happens; the very web and mesh of it all.”

          Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 31)

            “When I think back to my childhood, I visualize my father, my mother, and Gigi arranged as a philosophical triangle. My father was one side of the triangle: discipline. He taught me how to work, how to be relentless. He instilled in me an ethic that ‘It’s better to die than to quit.’ My mother: education. She believed that knowledge was the irrevocable key to a successful life. She wanted me to study, to learn, to grow, to cultivate a deep and broad understanding, to either ‘know what you’re talking about or be quiet.’ Gigi: love (God). Whereas I tried to please my mother and father so I wouldn’t get into trouble, I wanted to please Gigi so that I could bathe in that transcendent ecstasy of divine love. These three ideas—discipline, education, love—would fight for my attention throughout the rest of my life.”

            Will Smith, Will (Page 39)

              “Gigi didn’t make a distinction between your burdens and her own. She truly believed the message of the Gospel. She saw loving and serving others not as a responsibility but as an honor. She was joyfully her brothers’ and sisters’ keeper.”

              Will Smith, Will (Page 38)

                “The bigger the fantasy you live, the more painful the inevitable collision with reality. If you cultivate the fantasy that your marriage will be forever joyful and effortless, then reality is going to pay you back in equal proportion to your delusion. If you live the fantasy that making money will earn you love, then the universe will slap you awake, in the tune of a thousand angry voices.”

                Will Smith, Will (Page 27)

                  “Fortune is not out to get you. Life is not picking on you. This is just what’s happening, period. It happens to involve you…but it does not revolve around you.

                  Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog

                    “Mom-mom would never say it to Daddio, but she would repeat all the time, ‘Never argue with a fool, because from a distance, people can’t tell who’s who.’ So when she would stop arguing with you, you knew what she thought of your position.”

                    Will Smith, Will (Page 20)

                      “How we decide to respond to our fears, that is the person we become.”

                      Will Smith, Will (Page 14)

                        “He hit her again, knocking her to the ground. She stood right back up, looked him in the eye, and calmly said, ‘Hit me all you want, but you can never hurt me.’ I have never forgotten that. The idea that he could hit her body but somehow she was in control of what ‘hurt’ her? I wanted to be strong like that.”

                        Will Smith, Will (Page 13)