Earning His Keep
In the book, The Pursuit of Happyness, Chris Gardner shares his struggles with single parenting, seeking stable employment, and battling both while homeless for a period of time during the 1980s. Through sheer grit, determination, and unconditional love for his son and namesake, Christopher Gardner, Jr., Chris pounds the pavement in search of a lucrative life.
Chris Gardner
Christopher Paul Gardner was born on February 9, 1954 to Bettye Jean Gardner Triplett in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Chris was often shuttled from one foster home to another, living with his mother in between, and his father was absent from his life. He faced alcoholism, poverty, and domestic and sexual abuse during his childhood.
After graduating high school, Chris joined the Navy; upon discharge, he relocated to San Francisco at twenty years old, where he found employment as a supply distributor for a medical research company. After his son, Christopher, Jr., was born in 1981, he began to search for employment within the finance industry, an area which had always interested him.
During this time, Chris and his family were barely making a living, and his son's mother left, leaving Christopher, Jr. behind with Chris. Determined to provide for his son and to better his financial circ*mstances, Chris earned a position with the Dean Witter Reynolds training program. Eventually, he and his son became homeless because his meager earnings as a trainee couldn't support the two of them.
For almost a year, Chris and his son received housing and food assistance from churches, soup lines, homeless shelters, and cheap motels. Once, they were reduced to sleeping in a subway station restroom. Because he had grown up without a father, Chris had promised himself that he would never leave his own children; it was a promise he was determined to keep at all costs.
Once, when searching for an affordable daycare program for his son, Chris came upon one whose sign had misspelled happiness as 'Happyness'. In later years, Chris would use the incorrect spelling in the title of his autobiography due to the impact of his explanation to his son about the word's meaning.
Pressing onward, Chris completed the training program, eventually founding his own brokerage firm, Gardner Rich, in Chicago in 1987. He's a well-known philanthropist, contributing to charities that support causes close to his heart: homelessness, fatherhood, employment assistance, domestic violence, and financial literacy.
The Pursuit of Happyness earned the honor of spending twenty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into forty languages. The book was also adapted for a film by the same name in 2006, of which Chris Gardner was an associate producer and was portrayed by Will Smith.
Quotes
The Pursuit of Happyness is filled with inspirational, motivational quotes from Chris Gardner, a man who knows the truth of what he speaks. In this book, he uses his experiences and his thoughts to infuse his readers with the drive to pursue their own destinations of happiness.
''The future was uncertain, absolutely, and there were many hurdles, twists, and turns to come, but as long as I kept moving forward, one foot in front of the other, the voices of fear and shame, the messages from those who wanted me to believe that I wasn't good enough, would be stilled.''
''Others may look for all kinds of ways to diminish your worth. But what is inside you no one can take from you or tarnish.''
''It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.''
''Still a dreamer, yet more of a realist than ever before, I knew this was my time to sail.''
''The ability to learn another language in one arena, whether it was music, medicine, or finance, could be used to accelerate learning and other arenas, too.''
Lesson Summary
Chris Gardner, once a homeless, jobless, single father, rose in the ranks as a powerful stockbroker by hard work, sacrifice, determination, and love for his son. After surviving an abusive, poverty-stricken childhood, Chris joined the Navy.
After his discharge at the age of twenty, he moved to San Francisco to work in the medical industry. He became a father to Christopher, Jr., whose mother abandoned them. As a single father, Chris had no money, no real job prospects, no home, and survived through public charities.
After his internship with Dean Witter Reynolds, Chris worked his way up the financial ladder of success to own his own brokerage firm and to become a wealthy, generous, and motivational benefactor to many causes. He shared his story in his memoir The Pursuit of Happyness, as encouragement for others to follow their own pursuits of 'happyness.'
