User:GravityFong/Reader's Digest/Jan 2007/Will Power

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There's a rubik's cube on the coffee table, not one metre from where Will Smith sits in the fifth-floor living room of his river-front home in New York City. The former teen star, who started his career as a rapper, then became an actor and movie producer and is now practically a one-man entertainment industry, has a simple philosophy: I can do it.

Smith, 38, is talking about the Cube, but that's also the way he looks at pretty much everything. From his dad, he says, he learned to look for patterns in life, and figure out how to make them work in his favour. From his mother he learned the value of knowledge, even though he quit his formal education after high school. And from somewhere, Smith discovered an unshakable belief that he can accomplish anything he sets his mind to.

So far he has. At age 12, he began performing rap music at parties in his hometown of Philadelphia. By the time he was 20, his upbeat lyrics had translated into seven Billboard hits and won him a Grammy. At 21, Smith moved to Hollywood and landed a starring role on the hit TV sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, then went on to pursue his dream of becoming a movie star. Films like Independence Day, Enemy of the State and Ali, for which he was nominated for an Oscar, proved that, yes, Will Smith can do it.

RD: You grew up in Philadelphia in the '70s. What was your neighbourhood like? Smith: It was probably 50 per cent Orthodox Jewish. One neighbourhood over were all the pretty little Muslim girls. Mine was a Baptist household, and I went to a Catholic school. I was surrounded by many different religions.

RD:What was your experience growing up black in this neighbourhood? My school was 90 per cent white, but most of the kids I played with were black. So I got the best of both worlds. I think that is where my comedy developed. In black neighbourhoods, everybody appreciated comedy about real life. In the white community, fantasy was funnier. I started looking for jokes that were equally hilarious across the board, for totally different reasons.

RD:Is it true that at one point you were planning to go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)? My mother, who worked for the School Board of Philadelphia, had a friend who was the admissions officer at MIT. I had pretty high SAT scores and they needed black kids, so I probably could have gotten in. But I had no intention of going to college.

RD:Because you got a record deal? My first record came out while I was a senior in secondary school, which is dangerous. Life is too good.

RD:So you said, Mum, gotta tell ya... I told my parents I wanted to rap. They said, "Rap?" My mother graduated from Carnegie Mellon. She thought university was the only way. My father could kind of see doing something differently. We agreed that I would take a year making music, and if it did not work out, I would go to university. That year we won the first Grammy given to a rap artist.