FACE YOUR FEARS

Face Your Fears

Will Smith talks about leaping past your fears to realise that they’re only standing between you and the best life you can live.

“You take a drink with your friends, and somebody says, ‘Yeah, we should go skydiving tomorrow!” You go, ‘Yeah, we’ll go skydiving tomorrow!’ ‘Yeah! Yeah!’ Everybody goes, ‘Yeah!’ Then that night, you’re laying in your bed and you just keep, ‘Uh, uh.’ You’re terrified. You keep imagining over and over again jumping out of an airplane, and you can’t figure out why you would do that. You wake up the next day, and you go down you said you were going to meet, and everybody’s there. You get in the van and be like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ Your stomach is terrible. You can’t eat and everything, but you don’t want to be the only punk who doesn’t jump out of this airplane. You fly, and you go up, you go up, you go up, and you go up to 14,000 feet.

“Somebody opens the door, and in that moment, you realize you’ve never been in a freaking airplane with the door open. You’re looking out down to death. They say, ‘On three,’ and they say, ‘One, two,’ and he pushes you on two because people grab on three. You go, ‘Ahhh.’ You fall out of the airplane. In one second, you realize that it’s the most blissful experience of your life. You’re flying. There’s zero fear. You realize at the point of maximum danger is the point of minimum fear. It’s bliss. Why were you scared in your bed the night before? What do you need that fear for? Everything up to the stepping point, there’s actually no reason to be scared. It only just ruins your day. The best things in life are on the other side of terror, on the other side of your maximum fear, are all of the best things in life.”