I never met Will Smith, but I understood on a profound level what he meant when he said that he wasn’t responsible for much of his success - rather, it was the people around him.

I grew up watching the Fresh Prince of Bel Air – the misadventures of Will and Carlton, and the stern but fatherly advice of Uncle Phil. As a young black boy in America, I wanted to be Will Smith. From him, I learned that you needed to make things look effortless, even when they weren’t. Look cool, among all else.

One of the gifts of getting older is that you get to unpeel the layers of things you didn’t fully understand while you were growing up. I began to listen back to Will Smith’s memoir titled “Will”.

An illusion I’ve slowly been free from recently is the concept of solo success. The idea is that the most successful actors, CEOs, musicians and artists got there themselves. If you talk to a solo success for long enough, you’ll slowly start to see the outlines of invisible hands of others who pushed and pulled the person forwards.

Will Smith ending up as the lead of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air was a happy accident. He left Philadelphia after being swept up in a potential federal investigation involving a local gangster. He felt more inclined to leave after finding out his girlfriend had cheated on him. He ended up in LA partially because a woman he had a crush on lived there and promised to take him in. He was in debt to the IRS to the tune of $1M as a result of unpaid taxes. With all of this weighing heavily on his shoulders, he was in the midst of what was likely a depressive episode, when his girlfriend at the time urged him to just get out there.

During previous visits to LA, he had met pop culture’s then king maker, Arsenio Hall, who invited him to glad hand with other celebrities backstage before, during and after show tapings. His security guard and lifelong friend Charlie Mack would approach everyone and ask “Yo, do you know who the Fresh Prince is?”. One day, he was introduced to Bennie Medina, who knew Quincy Jones, and the rest is history….

Success in any form is a result of happy accidents like this. American culture is an outlier in its emphasis on the individual, and the era of social media has exaggerated this. A swipe through social media is a visit to Me-ville, a town with one million mayors, one million protagonists, and one million lonely townspeople.

In our own stories, maybe we’re not exactly where we want to be yet, but if we turn back and squint as we look down the path, we’ll see the happy accidents and the very visible hands of those who pushed and pulled us to exactly where we’re meant to be.

Happy Accidents