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 in Wisconsin on Christmas day, you couldn’t accuse Chris Gardner of being 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 that her husband was in at the time. Despite this, Chris regarded her as a positive influence of perseverance and self-reliance and 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 and made plans 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 8k/year salary as a lab assistant wasn’t enough to support a family, he abandoned his medical aspirations and took a job as a medical equipment salesman. But selling medical equipment turned out to be more of a lesson in rejection than it was a paycheck, so he continued to struggle to make ends meet. 

It all changed one day when he saw a man pull up in a red ferrari. Chris had two questions for the man, “What do you do? And how do you do it?” The man was a stock broker and agreed to meet with Chris and help him learn the business of finance. Over the next few months, Chris met with managers of financial firms interviewing 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 as most applicants had completed Masters degrees and Chris had no college education whatsoever. He persisted, and it appeared that he finally got his break when he was hired on at E.F. Hutton. However, 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. 

In addition to this crushing letdown, his relationship with Jackie was falling apart. They fought so loudly one day 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 Chris Gardner’s life was extraordinary enough to be on the big screen. Will Smith plays Chris in the blockbuster The Pursuit of Happyness that portrays the inspiring true story of how Smith’s character overcame insurmountable odds living homeless for nearly a year with his toddler son whom Jackie had dropped off four months after she left with an, “I can’t do this. It’s your turn.” They slept wherever they could; in his office after hours, motels, parks, airports and a bathroom of a subway station. He scrambled to find daycare and bathed his son by candlelight in the sink. He arrived at the office early each day and stayed late, persistently making 200 calls per day to prospective clients, and eventually passed his test, becoming a full employee, and a successful stockbroker. (Pause while we lift our chins off the floor.) Wow! 

We could ask Chris the same question he himself 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 his situation shouted, “NO, you can’t!”, where did he get the voice in his head 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 did it all, Chris said, “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 out of his experience, I don’t have.” And you wouldn’t be all wrong. Chris is Chris and you are you. However, we’d like to show in this module the ways that optimistic traits can be grown and developed within you 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).