Will Smith acceptance speech at the 2005 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards
I’m gonna say something that I want you to remember for the rest of your lives, okay, I want you to listen closely. I’m giving you the key to life right now. This is the key to lifeThe key to life, the key to life, is running and reading. Alright? Now listen, I’m very serious. The key to life is running and reading.
Alright, now, why running? When you’re running, when you’re out there and your running, there’s a little person who talks to you. And that little person says, “Ohh , I’m tired, my lungs are about to pop up. I’m so hurt. Ohhh, I’m so tired, there’s no way I can possibly continue.” And you want to quit. Right? That person–if you learn how to defeat that person when you’re running–you will learn how to not quit when things get hard in your life. Running–alright–that’s the first key to life.
Reading! The reason that reading is so important: There have been millions and billions and billions and gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There is no new problem that you could have–with your parents, with school, with a bully, with anything–there is no problem you could have that someone else hasn’t already solved, and wrote about it in a book.
So, the keys to life are running and reading.
In my humble opinion, Will Smith’s speech at the 2005 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards is one of the most underrated speeches ever. The speech is perfect in that it applies to a dual audience of children and adults. My only fear is that the powerful message in his words will not resonate with children as much as it should. At this point, in most of their lives they have not faced enough challenges to truly understand and apply Will Smith’s message.
Firstly, Will Smith really gets at the importance of perseverance in life; that ability to keep going at times when we feel like we have already given all that we are physically capable of giving. This is especially true with athletes because of the physical toll their professions take on their bodies. However, it is not limited to them. The key to perseverance is the mental toughness; that is something that can be applied to any aspect of life. Most successful people achieve because they persevere with their dreams even when no one else believes.
The second piece of advice resonates with me to a much greater extent because it has a deeper meaning. On the surface, he speaks to the mere ability to read as a valuable skill to attain information. But more importantly, he speaks to the importance of shared experience. Success is not attained only through the efforts of the individual but through the experiences of the people who influence that individual. It is very rare to hear of a successful individual who achieved great things alone. Chances are if you have a problem, there is someone before you who had to deal with it. If you want to be the best at something, you can use the examples of the people before you (both the successes and the short-comings).