The Chris Gardner Story That Inspired the Movie “The Pursuit of Happyness”

Maybe the name Chris Gardner doesn’t tell you much, but maybe you’ve seen or heard of the movie. Looking for happiness, starring Will Smith. The production was inspired by the true story of Christopher Gardner, a man who faced difficulties at various times in his life and was forced to sleep on the street with his son.

O awesome.club wants to share with you the story of this man beyond the events narrated in the film: his childhood, the path to success and his life today.

Christopher Paul Gardner was born on February 9, 1954 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. His childhood is far from a fairy tale. With an absent father, his mother, Bettye Jean, remarried. Her husband Freddie Triplett was a man who ended up deeply marking Chris’ life🇧🇷

Triplett was an alcoholic and abusive to his wife and children. He once even accused Chris’ mother of working while at the same time receiving help from Social Services, which led to her being sent to prison. During this time, Chris and his three sisters had to live temporarily in foster homes. One day, she was released, but would be arrested again. Desperate, the woman tried to burn down Triplett’s house with him inside.

In a period when been in a shelter for minorsAs a boy, Chris was also forced to face another difficult time when he was raped by a neighbor, something he later said he blocked and hidden until he became an adult.

One day that stuck in Chris’ memory was Christmas, when he was about 16 years old. While taking a shower, his stepfather suddenly forcibly entered the bathroom with a shotgun and kicked him out of the house, leaving him on the street wet and naked on a cold night.

After having lived through this series of experiences, Chris had something very clear: he wouldn’t be like his stepfather🇧🇷 Alcoholism, violence and illiteracy would not be part of his life. Instead, she chose to take her mother as an example of strength.

“I chose to embrace the spirit of my mother, who, despite the fact that she denied, postponed and destroyed many of her own dreams, still taught me that I could dream,” says Gardner.

Chris left Wisconsin when he joined the US Navy and joined the medical corps. There, he met Dr. Robert Ellis, who offered him a job at the University of California Medical Center as a research assistant. So, in 1974, he moved to San Francisco.

By then, Chris seemed to have a good future. In 1977, he married Sherry Dyson and planned to study medicine, but then realized the investment of time and money that training in that career would require, so he changed his mind. This affected his relationship, which was already not very good, with his then wife.

He later met Jackie Medina and she became pregnant, so Chris separated from his wife to take care of Jackie and their son. At that time, he was working as a sales representative for a medical equipment company, but his salary was insufficient to pay all expenses and the debts started to accumulate🇧🇷

Chris’ life changed when, one day, he saw a well-dressed man on the street get out of a red Ferrari. Impressed, he asked, “What do you do and how?” The man was Bob Bridges, a stockbroker, who made about $80,000 a month. He introduced Chris to the world of finance and motivated him to apply for an internship and learn more about the business.

Buoyed by the prospect of achieving long-awaited success, Chris canceled his sales and deferred payment of parking tickets until he was accepted into the E.F. Hutton company’s internship program. So he left his old job. Unfortunately for him, when his first day at the new company arrived, he learned that the person who had hired him had been fired.

With a young child and a deteriorating relationship, Chris was forced to look elsewhere for a new opportunity and secured an interview at Dean Witter Reynolds to become a stockbroker🇧🇷

Once again, luck would play a trick on him, and a week before the interview date, he was arrested for the $1,200 he had accumulated in fines. He spent 10 days in jail and, upon leaving, found that Jackie had left with his son and all of his belongings. The day after his release, Chris had to attend the interview in the same clothes he had been arrested in: jeans, sneakers, and a jacket. Still, he was accepted into the internship program and went on to receive a salary of $1,000 a month.

Four months later, Jackie returned with little Christopher and they decided it was best for the boy to stay with his father. There was just one small problem: the boarding house where Chris lived did not accept children and he had no money to pay another rent. It was then that he began a pilgrimage for father and son.

The money he earned was just enough for diapers, food, and day care, so when it came to deciding whether to spend the money on food or shelter, the option was always food. Chris and his little one spent their nights where there was: Cheap hotels, hostels for the homeless, parks, under a table at the company where Chris worked and even in a public restroom at a subway station in Oakland.

Chris and his son spent about a year going from one “home” to another. During this period, he continued his internship at the Stock Exchange and never told colleagues that he had nowhere to live. However, he received help from someone he didn’t expect: the Reverend Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church, who gave him housing, despite being a program only for mothers in need. In fact, even some “ladies of the night” (as Chris himself calls them) started handing him $5 bills when they saw him with his boy in a broken stroller.

To earn a few extra bucks, Chris did some odd jobs: mowing lawns, tending gardens, fixing roofs, cleaning basements, and even selling his blood, though he was never very proud of it.

After going through difficult times and standing out as a dedicated and persevering worker, in 1982 Chris was given the opportunity to take his exam for a stockbroker’s license and got a steady job with a considerably better salary, so he was able to pay rent.

The man went from being an intern with no place to sleep to becoming a respected stockbroker. He was even offered a job on Wall Street, in New York, where he lived two years before moving to Chicago and founding Gardner Rich & Co., his own company, with an initial investment of $10,000, in 1987.

A year later, he had already managed to earn more than a million dollars. Lack of money was no longer a problem. Excited about your achievement, bought his own Ferrarijust not just any one, but that of basketball player Michael Jordan.

In 2006, Chris had managed to expand his company in amazing ways and sold it in a multi-million deal. He later became the founder of Christopher Gardner International Holdings, with offices in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and with which he cooperates with several philanthropic organizations dedicated to education, access to housing and job creation.

Chris is currently a successful speaker and travels the world motivating people to pursue their dreams and explaining topics related to business success, something he is very gratifying to do.

If you’ve watched the movie Looking for happiness, you may have noticed some differences from the story you just read. That’s because the production team took some creative licenses to better tell the story on film.

Here, we share with you some curious data related to the film:

The production is inspired by the book Looking for happiness, written by Gardner himself. The original English title is The Pursuit of Happynesswhere the word “happyness” is intentionally misspelled with “y” instead of “i”, as such an error originally appeared in the name of the daycare where Chris dropped off their son every day.

In real life, during the events narrated in the film, Chris’ son was only two years old, but in the film adaptation Christopher (played by Jaden Smith) was five. The writers did so so that father and son could have more meaningful interactions on screen.

In the movie, we always see Chris carrying a portable bone density device and his struggle to sell it, but in reality he sold a much wider range of medical equipment.

As a laboratory for the role, Will Smith visited, along with Chris Gardner, the bathroom in Oakland where the protagonist of the real story came to sleep with his son. “We left him there for a few minutes, and when he came out, it wasn’t Will Smith, it was Chris Gardner,” said Gardner himself.

In a cameo near the end of the film, we see the real Chris appear on screen as he crosses characters on the street.

The movie doesn’t count, but while Chris was working in the stock market, he resumed his relationship with Jackie and they had a second daughter named Jacintha.

Christopher Jr. was very young when he went from place to place with his father and didn’t know they had nowhere to live. “I didn’t know we were homeless. I just remember that we moved around a lot. I just know that when I looked up, he was there. I looked around me and there he was,” he declared.

Chris’ story is really inspiring as it shows that despite difficulties, success is possible, which is why we wanted to write this post.

What did you think? Do you think Chris’ life would have been different if he hadn’t met the man in the red Ferrari? Tell us in the comments.