Chris Gardner from Homeless to Inspiration

When Chris Gardner talks about homeless people, his words resonate; he has walked in their shoes. He knows what it’s like just trying to survive.
“Remember these are still people,” he says. “They are not invisible. They each have a story.”
In his lifetime, the successful against-all-odds stockbroker who inspired the Academy Award-nominated The Pursuit of Happyness has accomplished many things—overcoming a violent childhood, rising out of homelessness, being a single father who broke the cycle of abuse with his children. Yet his story is much more than one of accumulating wealth and overcoming adversity. And he never forgets his past or the people who’ve touched his life.
In San Francisco in the early 1980s, Gardner earned a meager living selling medical supplies. He got the idea to pursue a career as a stockbroker from a man in a red Ferrari he met one day. Gardner said he’d let the man have the parking spot he was vacating if he would tell him what kind of work he did to afford the car. The man was a stockbroker.


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