Chris Gardner

Christopher Paul Gardner ( born February 9, 1954 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American broker who has transformed from being homeless to self-made millionaire.

Life and career

Chris Gardner grew up with his mother and stepfather. Due to various circumstances, his mother had to spend some time in prison, during which he was housed with his siblings in a nursing home. Later, Gardner joined the Navy. After the time in the Navy, he worked as a salesman of medical devices ( bone density measuring instruments), he could rarely sell. When he met a man named Bob Bridges in San Francisco, who got out of his red Ferrari, he asked him if he could ask him two questions. " What do you do? And how do you do it? " Bob Bridges replied that he was a stockbroker. To this end, he said that you just have to deal with numbers and customers. He also advised him to do an unpaid internship in a company, of which he had heard, and introduced him to another broker - sizes. During an only slightly paid internship, in the early 1980s in San Francisco, Gardner fell into a financial hole. During the day he went to work, he stayed with his young son Christopher for almost a year in homeless shelters and sometimes in toilets of the metro stations.

Chris Gardner received by the broker - training for a job and was later, with his own company Gardner Rich, a millionaire. Using the book version of his story, he conquered the top of the U.S. bestseller list. The book was made ​​into a film under the title of The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith in the lead role, with the movie does not hold in every detail to the real events.

"I was abandoned by my family child - so I would never let my own child down," Gardner says today in retrospect. The film, at its formation he worked as a consultant, had his mood and his then- Not well reproduced. In a report of the sender ABC Chris Gardner said: "My head belongs to my company, my heart belongs to my children. "

Chris Gardner today supports numerous charities, including the Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco, where he once with his son found shelter. In addition, he has been in the city in which he was once homeless financed a $ 50 million residential and employment project for poverty threatened and homeless people. In Chicago, he advises and teaches the homeless.