Discussion on Will Smith's type

Based on what I know of Will Smith, my assessment of his type is that he is a S type with a preference for Fe, so between SFJ and ESTP. However, I see very little discussion on Will Smith possibly having an Si preference so I decided to chime in and offer a perspective on Will Smith's type:

Possible Si preference?

For starters, Boye Akinwande, in the IDRlabs article "On Kanye West and the ISFJ Type", has stated that, "As a pattern of consciousness, one of Si’s dispositions is to absorb and reinforce the lessons taught by experience, forming accurate, deep, and rich impressions of the way in which reality was brought to bear on the Si type. Since a child’s caregivers and role models will often be central components of the person’s reality in childhood, one may often see Si types referring to the lessons imparted to them by their role models as, by comparison, Si types are uniquely suited to pay attention and hold on to those lessons from early childhood on." This pattern of Si can be found in Will Smith:

Interviewer: "You are really becoming an iconic figure, what do you think of that?"

Will Smith: "It's what my grandmother told me what I had to do." [Source]

Smith: "I consider myself an 'alchemist' ... My grandmother used to say 'life give you lemon, you go ahead and make lemonade', to me that's alchemy." [Source]

Smith: "You know it's an idea that my grandmother always had, that if you're gonna be here, then there's a necessity to make a difference. ... She always instilled the spiritual responsibility that you have to make every group you come into contact with better." [Source]

Smith: "[My father's brick wall was one] of the most impactful lessons I've ever received. ... When I focused on the wall, the job felt impossible. Never-ending. But when I focused on one brick, everything got easy—I knew I could lay one damn brick well. ... And the secret to my success is as boring as it is unsurprising: You show up and you lay another brick. Pissed off? Lay another brick. Bad opening weekend? Lay another brick. Album sales dropping? Get up and lay another brick. Marriage failing? Lay another brick. Over the past thirty years, like all of us, I have dealt with failure, loss, humiliation, divorce, and death. I've had my life threatened, my money taken away, my privacy invaded, my family disintegrated—and every single day, still, I got up, mixed concrete, and laid another brick. No matter what you're going through, there is always another brick sitting right there in front of you, waiting to be laid. The only question is, are you going to get up and lay it?" (Will by Will Smith with Mark Manson)

Smith: "I was raised to believe that I am inherently equipped to handle any problems that may arise in my life, racism included. Some combination of hard work, education, and God would topple any and all obstacles and enemies." (ibid.)

To expand upon the quote regarding "the wall", Akinwande has also stated, in the same article, that, "[Si types] are primarily orientated towards their own repository of thoroughgoing, yet at times also overly personalized and specific knowledge of the facts. ... In this respect, the Si type is not different from the Ni type who sees his own perspective and how his own idea must be true to the exclusion of all others; only the Ni type deals more with possibilities where the Si type deals more with facts. ... the same pattern [regarding Si] may also be observed in [Kanye] West’s own stated mentality concerning his recent attempts to break into the fashion industry: 'I have put in my 10,000 hours,' he said in reference to a commonly-known regimen for success introduced in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. ... He seems eager to subject all his knowledge to a predictable regimen. ... Having a hard time disengaging from his personalized and deeply-keeled sense impressions [and] the diligence and thoroughness that he knows he has put into the effort." 

Similar to what Akinwande stated about Kanye West's eagerness to subject all his knowledge to a predictable regimen and exhibiting a diligence and thoroughness in his work, we can draw a parallel with Will Smith, where he stated that "the secret to my success is as boring as it is unsurprising: You show up and you lay another brick." The quote also aligns with what IDRlabs has stated in their "Cognitive Functions at a Glance" infographic regarding Si, describing the function as "retaining", "persistent", and "procedure." Even in his memoir introduction, prior to the quote, he did seem quite caught up in his own impressions leading up to the aforementioned excerpt. So I think the "personalized and deeply-keeled sense impressions" aspect of Si also applies to Will Smith in this context. 

In addition, the fact that he has stated to have consistently "focused on one brick" throughout his career is in line with IDRlabs' observation that individuals with Si preference prefer to remain dedicated to a single task at hand. As IDRlabs has stated in their Woodrow Wilson article, Si prefers "to stay with the one task at hand. As Jung also says, 'the Sensation type remains with things' (Tavistock Lecture I §33). This 'thing' may be big or small, abstract or concrete, long- or short-term, present- or future-oriented, but the common denominator is that the psyche of the Si type stays in harness throughout the task set before it. ... The Si type may also operate by amplification, but it is usually by way of the concentration and patient focus on the amplification of one object that the Si type reveals himself."

One might argue that Se types can also be persistent in pursuit of their goals and distill lessons from personal experience (which is true) but one general theme amongst them is that they are typically "less consistent, more freely adapting themselves to the unordered ever-changing object" which I don't think applies to Will Smith as much as it may seem, with him saying "over the past thirty years ... every single day, still, I got up, mixed concrete, and laid another brick." As an aside, I would also like to note that this isn't the first time that Will Smith mentioned about "the wall". He mentioned it on other occasions in the past, so this is something that he has been rather consistent with rather than just something he (and Mark Manson) decided to divulge for his memoir introduction:

Smith: "I learned very young from my parents ... that you don't try to build a wall. You don't set out to build a wall. You don't say, 'I'ma build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that's ever been built.' You don't start there. [Instead] you say, 'I'm gonna lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. There will not be one brick on the face of the earth that's gonna be laid better than this brick that I'm gonna lay in the next ten minutes.' And you do that every single day. And soon you have a wall. ... My father owned ... an old bakery. When I was growing up, my father was an electrician and a refrigeration man. We would install supermarkets - ... long freezer cases in supermarkets ... and all the lights. That's what we would do every summer. So this one year, my father had his shop, and he decided, for whatever reason, that he wanted a new wall on the front of his shop. So he tore down probably about 16 feet high and probably about 30 feet long. He just completely tore the wall down. My brother and I had to dig a six-foot hole ... for the foundation. We would mix in the concrete by hand [for] a year and a half. We were building this wall for a year and a half. Every day after school, we would come in, mixing concrete, put it in the hole, doing it. And it was just myself and my little brother. And I remember standing back, looking at that wall, saying, 'There's going to be a hole here forever.' ... A year and a half later, we laid the final brick. My father stood back with my brother and me. I know he planned this, he says he didn't, but I know he had been planning this and writing this for the past two years. We stood back, looked at the wall, and he looked at me and my brother. He said, 'Don't y'all ever tell me that you can't do something.' And he walked into the shop." [Source]

CBS: "One summer, his dad tore down a brick wall in the front of his business and told 12-year-old Will and his 9-year-old brother to rebuild it, a job they said was impossible. It took them a year and a half, but they did it. 'And he said, 'Now, don't you ever tell me there's somethin' that you can't do.' And walked right through that door, went inside. And me and my brother stood here and looked. And said, 'Daddy crazy as hell, ain't he?'' Smith recalls, laughing. The wall is still there, and so is the lesson he learned from building it. 'I just put my head down and lay the first brick,' Smith explains." [Source]

With all this information in mind, it might be reasonable to assume that Will Smith wants to ‘recreate’ a pre-existing sensation, an abstracted sensation that he determined to be a trusted method of perceiving/living reality. "Retaining the information in the same context that it had when it was experienced" as IDRlabs puts it. 

In addition to all that has been said, Christian Vieweg in his IDRlabs article "Ni, Si, and Self-Delusion" said, "the Si bias towards perceiving the world as fundamentally unpredictable also carries its own capacity for engendering irrational ideas. Because Si types tend to see their own experiences as they relate to their personal subject, they sometimes fail to see the underlying connections between one experience and the next." I think the "bias towards perceiving the world as fundamentally unpredictable also carries its own capacity for engendering irrational ideas because Si types tend to see their own experiences as they relate to their personal subject" applies to Will Smith:

Oprah.com: "But even amid all their success, Will says he can't shake the survival mind-set of his youth. 'I still have a poor person's mentality. I can't shake it, and it gets really detrimental when you can't just shake off the ideas. It's like when I go to sleep at night, right now, I'm as financially nervous as I was 20 years ago.'" [Source]

Will Smith's meticulous preparations and attention to detail, such as memorizing the entire script for "The Fresh Prince," could be indicative of Si's tendency to contingency plan and consider all the minutiae. Si types, especially those with Si as one of their upper functions, often develop a thorough knowledge of all the details and plan against future possibilities. Will Smith's approach to his work and his desire to avoid failure by knowing every aspect of the script could be a possible check mark for Si:

Smith: "You can look at the first six episodes of The Fresh Prince and I was so just hell bent on not failing that I memorized the entire script. And you can see in certain shots they tried to cut around it as much as they can, but I am mouthing the other actor's lines." [Source]

 

Fe Preference?

 

This last part might be my weakest point but it's still something to consider. As IDRlabs has said regarding the extroverted judging functions, "If a judging function’s extroverted, it’ll have a preference for imposing an intelligible structure upon outer events. Outer objects & events are arranged according to schemata that come from the EJ type’s own mind rather than from the outer objects themselves." Simply put, Te and Fe are the functions most concerned with forming things into something else (even if done benevolently):

 

Oprah.com: "Willow says her dad is the disciplinarian in the house. 'When I'm in the studio, he keeps me working. He gives me motivation,' she says. 'He says, if you work through this, then you'll get a hit and everybody will buy it and you'll get lots of money. And he also teaches me that it's not all about money. It's about what you want to do.'" [Source]

 

Smith: "What you're trying to do, as artists, is to elevate humanity. When you're choosing your work and you're choosing the material that you're putting into the world, you have to understand that somebody else's kids are going to see that. Somebody's grandmother is going to see it. Are they going to be better or worse after they have contact with your material?'" [Source]

That is the end :) I have more points I could flesh out but I'll leave it here. One can certainly make an argument for a possible Fe preference for Will Smith (In fact, even if it doesn't turn out that he has Si, I still think Fe fits him better than Fi) but for now I will leave it here.