Chris Gardner's Story

Some lives are made for the movies. Raised in a home with an abusive stepfather —who once threw him outside naked at gunpoint on Christmas Day in Wisconsin—Chris Gardner was not a product of a charmed life. His mother served two jail sentences: once after being turned in by her own husband (Chris’ stepfather) for collecting welfare while working, and once for setting fire to the house while he was still inside. Despite this, Chris regarded her as a positive influence of perseverance and self-reliance. He remembered her telling him, “You can only depend on yourself. The cavalry ain’t coming.”  

After highschool, Chris enlisted in the Navy where he worked in a clinical research lab, planning to pursue a medical career. But after an affair ended his three-year marriage, Chris moved in with his pregnant girlfriend, Jackie, to await the birth of their son. Realizing that his $8000/year salary as a lab assistant wasn’t enough to support a family, he abandoned his medical aspirations and took a job selling medical equipment. Unfortunately, selling medical equipment turned out to be more of a lesson in rejection than it was a paycheck, and he continued to struggle financially.  

It all changed one day when he saw a man pull up in a red Ferrari. Chris had two questions for him, “What do you do? And how do you do it?” The man was a stockbroker, and he agreed to meet with Chris and help him learn the business of finance. Over the next few months, Chris interviewed with managers at various financial firms, hoping for a position in one of their training programs—and, in the process, collected a pile of parking tickets as he rushed from one appointment to the next. The odds were against him: most applicants had master’s degrees, and Chris had no college education whatsoever. Still, he persisted, and it seemed like he finally caught his break when he was hired on at E.F. Hutton. But, when he showed up for work on his first day he learned that his hiring manager had been fired and nobody knew who Chris was or cared that he’d been offered a position.  

Meanwhile, his relationship with Jackie was falling apart. One day, they fought so loudly the neighbors called the police. When they came to investigate, they ran his license plate and arrested him for failure to pay his parking violations. This landed him in jail for 10 days and nearly caused him to miss his ‘last chance’ interview at Dean Whitter. He was released a day before his interview and came home to find that Jackie had left with their son and had “taken everything with her but the dust”. He only had the clothes he was wearing when he was arrested 10 days earlier. And so, it was in those clothes that he went to his interview and could only explain himself with the truth because he couldn’t think of a lie fantastic enough. It turned out that the manager had himself gone through three divorces, and Chris won the coveted, though unpaid position in the training program (Gardner, 2009).  

If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it became the basis for the movie The Pursuit of Happyness, starring Will Smith as Chris Gardner. The film tells the remarkable true story of how Chris survived nearly a year of homelessness with his young son—whom Jackie returned to him four months after she left, saying, “I can’t do this. It’s your turn.” Chris and his son slept wherever they could: in his office after hours, in motels, parks, airports—even in a subway station bathroom. He found daycare when he could and bathed his son by candlelight in public restrooms. He arrived at the office early, stayed late, made 200 calls a day to prospective clients, passed his licensing exam, and eventually became a full-time employee and a successful stockbroker. (Pause while we lift our chins off the floor.) 

We could ask Chris the same question he once asked, “What do you do? And how do you do it!” What does Chris have that enabled him to pick himself up after each setback (self-inflicted or otherwise) again and again? When everything around him screamed, “No, you can’t!”, where did he find the inner voice saying, “Yes, you can!”? It’s one of those stories that makes you want to stand up and cheer for the human spirit. It makes you think, “I want that, too.” Once, when asked how he endured it all, Chris replied, “We were homeless, not hopeless”. To say it simply, Chris is an optimist. 

You might think, “But that’s not me. Whatever Chris was born with, or became through experience, I don’t have.” And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Chris is Chris, and you are you. However, this module will show you how optimistic traits, like any skill, can be developed within you, starting from wherever you are now. 

So, in the words of Chris Gardner:  

“If you’re ready to part ways with feeling hopeless or fearful, there are possibilities to be pursued that you may not have considered. You can be empowered not just to feel better but, more important, to pursue your own path to being who you were always meant to be in this world” (Gardner, 2009).