Chris Gardner

Gardner was advised to consider more lucrative career options; a few days before his 26th birthday, he informed his wife, Sherry, of his plans to abandon his dreams of becoming a physician.

His relationship with Sherry was detached, in part because of his decision to abandon a medical career and in part due to differences in their behavior.

While still living with Sherry, he began an affair with a dental student named Jackie Medina, and she became pregnant with his child only a few months into the affair.

After three years of marriage to Sherry, he left her to move in with Jackie and to prepare for fatherhood.

Christopher Paul Gardner (born February 9, 1954) is an American businessman and motivational speaker.

Gardner was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on February 9, 1954, to Thomas Turner and Bettye Jean Gardner.

He was the second child and the only boy born to Bettye Jean.

His older half-sister, Ophelia, is from a previous union.

His younger sisters, Sharon and Kimberly, are children from his mother's marriage to Freddie Triplett.

Gardner did not have many positive male role models as a child, as his father was living in Louisiana during his birth, and his stepfather was physically abusive to both his mother and his sisters.

Triplett's fits of rage made both Gardner and his sisters constantly afraid.

In one incident, Bettye Jean was imprisoned when Triplett falsely reported her to the authorities for welfare fraud; the children were placed in foster care.

When Gardner was eight years old, he and his sisters returned to foster care for the second time when their mother, unbeknownst to them, was convicted of trying to kill Triplett by burning down the house while he was inside.

While in foster care, Gardner first became acquainted with his three maternal uncles: Archibald, Willie, and Henry.

Of the three, Henry had the most profound influence on him, entering Gardner's world at a time when he most needed a positive father figure.

However, Henry drowned in the Mississippi River when Chris was nine years old.

The children learned that their mother had been imprisoned when she arrived at Henry's funeral escorted by a prison guard.

Despite both her very unhappy marriage and her periods of absence, Bettye Jean was a positive source of inspiration and strength to her son Chris.

She encouraged Gardner to believe in himself and sowed the seeds of self-reliance in him.

Gardner quotes her as saying, "You can only depend on yourself. The cavalry ain't coming."

Gardner also determined from his early experiences that alcoholism, domestic abuse, child abuse, illiteracy, fear, and powerlessness were all things he wanted to avoid in the future.

Inspired by his Uncle Henry's worldwide adventures in the U.S. Navy, Gardner decided to enlist when he finished secondary schooling.

He was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for four years, where he was assigned as a hospital corpsman.

He became acquainted with a decorated San Francisco cardiac surgeon, Dr. Robert Ellis, who offered Gardner a position assisting him with innovative clinical research at the University of California Medical Center and Veterans Administration Hospital in San Francisco.

Gardner accepted the position, and moved to San Francisco upon his discharge from the Navy in 1974.

Over the course of two years, he learned how to manage a laboratory and to perform various surgical techniques.

By 1976, he had been given full responsibility over a laboratory and had co-authored several articles with Dr. Ellis that were published in medical journals.

On June 18, 1977, Chris Gardner married Sherry Dyson, a Virginia native and an educational expert in mathematics.

With his knowledge, experience, and contacts within the medical field, it appeared Gardner had his medical career plans laid out before him.

However, with ten years of medical training ahead of him and with changes in health care just on the horizon, he realized that the medical profession would be vastly different by the time he could practice medicine.

During the early 1980s, Gardner struggled with homelessness while raising a toddler son.

His son Christopher Jarrett Gardner Jr. was born on January 28, 1981.

Gardner worked as a research lab assistant at UCSF and at the Veterans' Hospital after leaving the service.

His position as a research lab assistant paid only about $8,000 a year, which was not enough for him to support a live-in girlfriend and a child.

After four years, he quit these jobs and doubled his salary by taking a job as a medical equipment salesman.

Prompted by his son's inquiries about his father, Gardner had previously been able to track down his biological father via telephone.

Nine years elapsed before he and Sherry were legally divorced in 1986.

He became a stockbroker and eventually founded his own brokerage firm Gardner Rich & Co in 1987.

In 2006, Gardner sold his minority stake in the firm and published a memoir.

That book was made into the motion picture The Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith.