Will

In Chapter 9, Smith states that he has hit rock bottom. In both Chapter 9 and Chapter 10, Smith needs other people to help him get out of his slump. This demonstrates that incredibly motivated people need others to help them through difficult times. In the previous section, Smith and Jazzy Jeff needed Daddio to come to the Bahamas to convince them to stop wasting their time and actually make a record. In Chapter 10, Smith needs Tanya to help him get out of his slump after Bucky’s death. From the beginning, Smith is shown to be a hard and determined worker. His failings, therefore, are not due to a lack of motivation. Rather, they are due to the overwhelming nature of early success, heartbreak, and past and present trauma. While Smith’s goal throughout life is to raise himself up so he can bring others along with him, as he narrates the role Daddio and Tanya played in helping him out of slumps, he relies equally on others to raise him up. Because he is willing to accept help and learn the lessons life teaches him, he is able to grow.

Chapter 11 expands on the theme of Money and Fame Cannot Buy Happiness and connects it to The Importance of Parental Involvement. Smith states that even though his television show is a tremendous success, he still feels uneasy because he knows things can change at any minute. He learned this lesson when his music stopped performing as well as it used to. He also was predisposed to look for something bad to happen because, as he explains at the beginning of the book, his father’s temper could prove disastrous to his mother at any time, and he learned as a child to stay hypervigilant even when things seemed okay. At this point in his life, this vigilance serves him well because it allows him to plan for the future. It benefits his career. Still, even as it propels his career, this innate tendency robs him of the ability to feel happy with the success he has achieved so far. This theme will re-emerge in later chapters as his hypervigilance and inability to appreciate his own success start to wear on Smith as a person, and he has to learn to be okay with stillness. At this point, however, he sees this tendency to plan for contingencies to be necessary.

As he had as a child and in the hip-hop industry, Smith continues to feel as though he is straddling different worlds as his acting career takes off. In Chapter 11, the consequences of this almost prove disastrous. Smith writes,

[W]hen you grow up in violent environments, your mind adapts to perceive threats everywhere. You reason that you cannot afford to get caught up slipping even once. You begin to respond to a perceived threat and to actual violence equally, even though they’re very different things (197).

As a result, they misread a conflict with the executives in charge of Fresh Prince as a threat and almost resort to violence themselves. The title of this chapter, “Adaptation,” points to the way the two men respond to the mistake they made. They realize that the consequences could have been dire if they had acted on their instincts since they are now living in a different world with different rules. Because of this insight, they can adapt as necessary to the new world with new expectations. While Smith feels a disconnect between the streets of Philadelphia and the executive offices in Hollywood, he adapts his behavior and saves his career.

When deciding to divorce Smith, Sheree claims that Smith is “in love with the idea of her” rather than the actual person she is (235). This is an important theme in the memoir: that Smith sees people as he wants to see them rather than as they actually are. This is a problem that will continue to plague him, as his future daughter will eventually say something very similar about him. Smith has a clear idea of what he wants in life. His relationship with Sheree works out for a while because he likes being the protector and provider, while she likes being the homemaker. Ultimately, however, she decides that she cannot live up to the vision of her that he has painted in his head. It will take many years, until the end of the memoir, before Smith starts to learn about the importance of people’s feelings and their need to be understood.