Chris Gardner How to Open the Path to Riches in Life

Chris Gardner's path to riches began with a chance encounter in the parking lot of San Francisco General Hospital in 1982. He was 29 years old, with a one-and-a-half-year-old child, but he was still just a medical-equipment salesman who couldn't make ends meet. Gardner was parking when he noticed a red Ferrari looking for a spot. He offered to wave at the driver and said, "I'll give you my spot, but I want to ask you two questions: what do you do for a living? How are you successful?" The Ferrari owner said he was a stockbroker. Gardner asked how that job paid. At the time, the top salesman at Gardner's firm was making $80,000 a year. "This broker, on the other hand, was making $80,000 a month," Gardner said wistfully. The two men hit it off so well that they ****ed together for lunch from time to time. Slowly, the stockbroker told Gardner about making money in the stock industry and how to get started. He also gave Gardner a directory of listed securities. Gardner began knocking on doors of the stock market, but none were open. "At the time, most of the brokers' degrees were MBAs," he said. "I hadn't even been through the door of a college, and it wasn't racism, it was a requirement of the position." After 10 months of getting nowhere, Gardner met someone who was willing to give him a chance. So he resigned from his organization, only to find that his contact had been fired and no one knew who he was. Since then, he's been without a steady job. "I had to do everything to support my family - mowing lawns, cleaning basements, delivering garbage, I even learned to fix roofs and paint walls, and continued to look for opportunities on Wall Street." But life was never stable. After Gardner argued with his girlfriend, someone called the police. A routine check revealed a parking violation ticket he hadn't delivered, which led to 10 days in jail. To make matters worse, while he was incarcerated, his girlfriend ran away with their young son. "It hit me very hard. I grew up without a father, and I had made a promise to myself that I would never let my son be like me. Those were the most horrible days of my life. I was in prison, spending all day with murderers and rapists, and all I kept thinking was where is my son? Will I ever see him again?" Before going to prison, Gardner had arranged to meet with broker Dean Witter. As soon as he got out of jail, he went to meet the broker. Gardner decided to take his chances. The interviewer, a man who had been divorced several times, was sympathetic to Gardner. So Gardner was left to train. He was confident that he would be offered a satisfying job at the end of his training. After a few months, Gardner's girlfriend didn't want to take care of their son and gave the child to Gardner. But the boarding house didn't allow children, so he and his son had to live in a homeless shelter or simply on the street. "We left the shelter in the morning with my duffel bag on my back and my son's lightweight four-wheeler and his diaper bag in my hand. Many nights we slept in the washroom at the transit station or under the desk where I worked." For almost a year, son Christopher watched his dad every morning as he packed all their belongings. Now, everything changed. "Dad, we have to pack our stuff." Gardner recalls. "I told my son no more, we have keys now, we have a home." Within a few years, he realized his dream of working on Wall Street, and in 1987, he opened his own stockbroking firm in Chicago and bought himself a Ferrari. Gardner doesn't see his story as a fairy tale of a downtrodden man who became a rich man, but rather, as he puts it, "My story is the experience of how I enabled myself to beat the odds and become successful. My life could have easily been demoralized by family separation and homelessness, but I chose not to let those difficulties overwhelm me. Next to the difficulties is the way out, the opportunity, the hope."