If you’re absent during my struggle don’t expect to be present during my success.

This line is very widely credited to Will Smith across motivational sites and social media, and nothing we found points to any competing author or earlier source, so the attribution consensus is genuine. However, no primary source carries it: it does not appear in his one substantial book, the 2021 memoir "Will," and the actor has no published collection of letters and no speech collection or pamphlet in which we could locate it. Targeted searches of speech reprints and transcripts turned up other speakers on similar themes but no Will Smith address delivering these words. In short, the quote is consistently attributed to him but untraceable to anything he is documented to have said or written — hence "attributed" rather than verified, and readers should treat the exact wording as popularly ascribed rather than confirmed.