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You cannot be a secret and a success. Make the decision to get known and get seen and start The mindful way to lose weight — forever by Susan Hepburn. He was also homeless. Gardner couldn't afford both day care for his month-old son, whom he was raising alone, and a place to live.
So for a year he and Chris Jr. He remembered the words of his mother, Bettye Jean Triplett, another single parent, who grew up during the Depression outside Rayville, La. The cavalry ain't coming. So Gardner worked, making calls a day to snag clients for Dean Witter. Then, in , a story on local TV set in motion a series of events that will culminate this December, when a movie based on his life, "The Pursuit of Happyness", hits the theaters, with Will Smith playing the lead role.
And that is just the beginning. At 52, Gardner has a new goal: to become a household name. In May he released a memoir, which has the same title as the movie; it is now No. He and Mark Clayman, an executive producer on the movie, have also formed a company called Chris Gardner Inc. Among their ideas: another book, a CD of songs that have inspired him, a daytime talk show, and a reality-TV show with the same folks who did MTV's Real World, in which Gardner will lead a team of people into blighted neighborhoods to help families in need.
Gardner and his 14 employees work in a two-story building that looks like a squat glass box. Gardner's desk is a foot-long gleaming metal tail wing of a DC Mounted on the wall are two life-sized plaster elephant heads. Gardner, 6-foot-3 with a graying goatee, dresses in a style both breezy and impeccable: loose-fitting white linen shirt, cornflower-blue Bermuda shorts, and leather slippers.
Gardner's quirks he wears two watches, one on each wrist, to make sure he's always on time , his people skills, and his powerful personal story do have a made-for-TV resonance to them. Except that at this moment, as he smokes a Kool, he sighs and declares, "I'm tired of talking about myself.
Not only is he speaking to Fortune and Entrepreneur , the San Francisco Chronicle , Tavis Smiley, and so on , but he has also booked 50 speaking appearances. It is only Gardner's willingness to talk about himself that makes his plans plausible. Sure, he's something of an operator.
His period of homelessness -devastating at the time - has become the dramatic center to his life story, the part that makes people stop and listen. But his sincerity is also compelling.
Gardner is using his personal history - plus his persistence and manifest charisma - to sell the sense of possibility that he never lost. Born in in Wisconsin, Gardner didn't know his father growing up, and his mother was married to an abusive man.
At 18, Gardner graduated from high school and joined the Navy. He worked as a medic in North Carolina, then left the service in to work at a veterans' hospital in San Francisco. You can only depend on yourself. He was determined to escape from all these experiences and build a different and brighter future for himself.
He inspired himself with the works of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr and Eldridge Cleaver, to name a few, and expanded his world view by educating himself with south African historical events such as the Sharpeville massacre, apartheid and international racial issues, Horsfield, After completing secondary schooling, Gardner enlisted into the U. S Navy, inspired by his Uncle Henry, and was ass Retrieved May 18, , from www.
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