From Life on the Street to Easy Street
Jan. 17 -- A lot of deals have come and gone since the one that made Chris Gardner a millionaire.
Gardner is the head of his own brokerage firm and lives in a Chicago townhouse — one of his three homes — with a collection of tailored suits, designer shoes, and Miles Davis albums.
His path to this extraordinary success took a series of extraordinary turns. Just 20 years ago, Gardner was homeless and living, on occasion, in a bathroom at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Oakland, Calif.
Gardner was raised by his mother, a schoolteacher. He says he never knew his father while he was growing up. But his mother had a way of keeping him grounded when he dreamed of things like being a jazz trumpeter.
"Mothers have a way of saying things," Gardner said, "She explained to me, 'Son, there's only one Miles Davis and he got that job. So you have to do something else.' But what that something else was, I did not know."
Gardner credits his uncles with providing the male influence he needed. Many of them were military veterans. So, straight out of high school, he enlisted in the Navy for four years. He says it gave him a sense of what was possible.
A Red Ferrari and a Turning Point
After the military, Gardner took a job as a medical supply salesman. Then, he says, he reached another turning point in his life. In a parking lot, he met a man driving a red Ferrari.
"He was looking for a parking space. And I said, 'You can have mine. But I gotta ask you two questions.' The two questions were: What do you do? And how do you do that? Turns out this guy was a stockbroker and he was making $80,000 a month."
Gardner began knocking on doors, applying for training programs at brokerages, even though it meant he would have to live on next to nothing while he learned. When he finally was accepted into a program, he left his job in medical sales. But his plans collapsed as suddenly as they had materialized. The man who offered him the training slot was fired, and Gardner had no job to go back to.
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