by Gary L. Fisher

I have had the privilege to coach thousands of professional and aspiring business owners in my career.  Three decades, actually, with 23 years spent as a Wealth Advisor, and time overlapping in various management and marketing positions. I’ve seen them come, and I’ve seen them go. Without question, in my experience, the most critical component of success that I have observed is persistence:  the ability to focus on a goal, and stay focused, despite roadblocks and challenges. In my opinion, it is the single most critical factor to sustaining success.

When I’ve talked about the importance of persistence, I have used both theoretical and/or true-life examples. Finding REAL stories that resonate can be the difference-maker, when coaching a business owner. So it was with great excitement that I found the autobiography, The Pursuit of Happyness. The story seemed unbelievable—and those are always my favorite kind of stories!

It was in 2006 when the book was first published, that I first started talking to my team about a man who lived in a subway bathroom with his son as a single parent, while he was building his career as a stock broker. Many thought it was something that I was using as a metaphor, and it wasn’t until the book was produced that they believed it. Even then, they were skeptical; it just didn’t seem possible, but there it was in black and white.

Chris Gardner’s story is fairly well known now, and well worth a Google if you aren’t familiar with it.  His book became a New York Times and Washington Post #1 bestseller, and was also the inspiration for the movie of the same name, starring Will Smith, who received Academy Award, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for his performance. The basics are exceptional. In short Gardner found himself raising his two-year-old son, abandoned by his wife.  He was broke. So broke and alone, that he and his son lived in a filthy men’s bathroom in the San Francisco subway system, for a period of time.

Regardless of the obstacles, Gardner had a dream to become a successful stock broker, which he managed to do under the most trying circumstances imaginable. He later went on to form his own company, Gardner Rich and Company, becoming an entrepreneurial success, and multi-millionaire.  He sold his small stake in Gardner Rich, in a multi-million dollar deal in 2006, then becoming CEO and founder of Christopher Gardner International Holdings, with offices in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Today he focuses on his work as a motivational speaker.  Gardner’s net worth is currently estimated to be in excess of 60 million.

I had the chance to talk to Chris about his story and his advice for those looking to aspire to realize big dreams of their own.

Gary: To what do you attribute your desire to succeed at such a high level?

Chris: My mom! Without her I wouldn’t have had the vision or belief in myself to go for it. I was watching Jacksonville vs. UCLA in the NCAA championship game. The announcers were talking about the futures of two players in the game, Artis Gilmore and Pembrook Burrows. I said aloud to no one, “Wow, one day those guys are gonna make a million dollars!” My Mom Bettye Jean  responded, “Son, if you want to, one day you could make a million dollars.” I absorbed her words.

Gary: What advice would you give to people looking to duplicate your success or find their own path?

Chris: Ask yourself where are the opportunities, and what are you passionate about? Let’s find the places where those two things cross. That’s your sweet spot. The key is to find something you love to do so much, you can’t wait for the sun to rise to do it all over again.”

Gary: There’s a lot of focus these days on politics, government, a lot of arguing about entitlement, who’s to blame, who is responsible? How do you think about that given your journey?

Chris: That’s an interesting question Gary. I ‘d say that it’s important for you to accept that you are responsible for every bump in the road and obstacle you have faced. However, you are also responsible for every success too. It’s on you. I always say ‘I drove here’. I did it. You can’t change something unless you own it.”

Gary: What are you doing these days?

Chris: I am the CEO of my own brand:  Happyness. We left the ‘y’ in there to keep people mindful and aware that it’s your responsibility and that you are responsible for your happiness.

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The Christmas bells were jingling, and a rotund Santa manned a big, black pot. My Grandma held my hand, as I skipped across the bricks of the street. I always loved those cool, old bricks that lined the main drag of Saginaw Street. Ma and Grandma had taken me back downtown for one of our regular shopping trips. It was 1968, I was four years old, and things were hopping during the Christmas season in the town of my birth, Flint, Michigan. We headed off to Smith-Bridgman’s department store to look for a gift for my Grandpa. I hid in the racks and pretended they were tents.

Then, I wandered away…as usual. I found a clerk and told her that my Mom and Grandma “got lost”. The clerk paged them, and they scurried over to the wrap counter to pick me up. I told them to stay close so they didn’t get lost again. Next, it was over to the Kresge’s five and dime for some popcorn, and maybe something from that wonderful, old lunch counter. I loved downtown Flint growing up. As a little kid, whenever I heard the Petula Clark hit song Downtown, I was 100% positive that it was about MY downtown!

Over the years, I would spend many hours there, in the heart of Flint. I would watch it be supplanted by the fancy new suburban mall out on Miller Road, geographically the precise middle of nowhere to an Eastside kid used to everything being a bike ride away. I would watch as the downtown stores closed, one by one, and then were smashed by wrecking balls, wiping out their physical existence. Parking lots replaced Kresge’s and Smith Bridgman’s. The Sill Building, where the 80-year-old Polish immigrant seamstress embroidered my varsity jacket (as she had done for my mom and dad when they were in high school), gave way to ‘urban renewal’. Finally, no one I knew shopped downtown for much of anything.

For a time, it was visually a sad and lonely place. But even then as a 14-year-old, I would cruise my Tomos ‘79 moped down to get a burger and fries at Maxbeef, or zip around the overgrown lots and the abandoned old Industrial Mutual Association building, where I had so many great memories of going to the Shrine Circus with my grandparents. It was like a mini-Mad Max scene. On a blazing burgundy moped, at 40 mph, in nothing more than 70’s short-shorts, an Adidas t-shirt, tall white socks pulled up to my knees, and Adidas sneaks, it was actually pretty exhilarating. The brick street all to myself! The danger! The Mystery!

By the 80’s the old girl was being revitalized with a major expansion of the University of Michigan’s downtown Flint campus, new fancy restaurants like Figlio’s, the Water Street Pavilion, and hopping night clubs, like Hot Rocks and The Copa. I had a blast downtown in the 80s! But, it got a little sad again, as those businesses succumbed to the never-ending boom and bust cycle of a purely American rust belt industrial economy.

In the 90’s, I moved away for a few years, to Kalamazoo, but I stayed in close touch with “the bricks”, always visiting for family and friend events. When I returned to live, again, things were in back in motion, and the area’s future looked as bring as it had in many years. It was only to be knocked down a few rungs again by the dot com bust, 9/11, followed by a mini-recession, and then a maxi-recession. GM went bankrupt. Things looked worse than bleak, but then, the dusk is darkest before the dawn. Once again, Flint began it’s turn, to work it’s way back.

The University of Michigan was expanding again. Another round of new restaurants and businesses were going in. Michigan State was moving downtown, and a new Farmers Market was in place. In the midst of this growth cycle another massive new challenge arose: A growing chorus of people shouting about bad water. The alarm morphed in to a cacophony of turmoil, that echoed, quite literally, around the world. Today, I am reading about my hometown’s latest woes in Time, seeing discussions about Flint during Presidential debates, on the BBC, and in media as diverse as ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and National Geographic. Actor Michael Keaton mentioned Flint while receiving his Screen Actors Guild Award for his Oscar nominated film Spotlight, and celebrities Cher, Matt Damon, and Snoop Dog, have joined in with support.

This isn’t the first time my city was pronounced dead. People couldn’t see how Flint could survive the lumber boom being played out at the turn of the twentieth century. Then Flint innovated and became the worlds leading provider of carriages and surrey’s – hence the ‘Vehicle City’ moniker. When it became clear that horseless carriages would soon supplant that industry, the city reinvented itself again. Nameplates like Buick, Chevrolet, AC Spark Plug, and General Motors were born and raised in Flint. In 1986, Money Magazine pronounced Flint the “worst place to live in the country”, and a satirical movie called Roger and Me, was soon taken as a documentary. Maybe that shouldn’t have been a shock. Amidst the loss of 30,000 jobs it, all seemed plausible. Still, the city went on.

Today, Flint is home to the multi-billion dollar Diplomat Pharmacy, a sprawling and growing University of Michigan campus, a world class engineering school in Kettering University. We have Michigan State University, a superb Farmers Market, and General Motors, home to the multi-billion dollar Mott Foundation, nationally recognized hospitals, and the best coney islands on the planet. This doesn’t include the thousands of entrepreneurs, small business owners, artists, entertainers, athletes, and professionals who either hail from Flint or work here currently.

None of these distinctive shining stars diminishes the very real, and urgently pervasive challenges Flint faces on countless other fronts. There are enough societal challenges to fill a doctorate level curriculum in sociology, and public administration alike. But to suggest it’s a city of helpless victims would ignore reality, it would be an affront and disservice to the tough, smart, and in innovative success stories that are here now, and will continue to be created here in the future, in both Flint and the communities that surround it.

Over the last half-century the old bricks and I have seen a lot of action. We’ve seen good times and bad times. The happiest days you can imagine, and some of the saddest. The bricks have borne silent witness to the best of times, and certainly some of the worst as well. They watched Billy Durant dart across them with an idea for a new company called General Motors. World-class athletes, business geniuses, and men and women who would literally rewrite the history of America trod across their length. They watched a seemingly endless cycle of boom and bust over the years.

Along the way I have been privileged to watch, as well. My life has taken me from those happy days of holding my Mom and Grandma’s hands on Saginaw Street, to nearly a quarter of a century working with another street, Wall Street. My career, like those bricks has been diverse. Along the way I’ve helped blue-collar GM and union workers, business owners, millionaires, and aspiring millionaires. I’ve worked with young families, and retirees, couch potatoes and world-class athletes, alike.

Today, I’ve clients all over the country, but my office is back on the bricks. I can look out over those aged and small blocks of clay, laid in their orderly pattern, and envision the entirety of the American Century. The home of the American automobile industry, still so crucial to our national identity and economy, the American Arsenal of Democracy that was so critical to winning two World Wars, the birthplace of the American middle class, and the purveyor of a seemingly unending supply of athletic and artistic talent over the years.

From my phone and computer I can converse with clients in the sunny climes of South Florida and Southern California. I can talk to stock market analysts ensconced in their high rises on Wall Street in Manhattan. I can talk to international money managers who just landed in Berlin or London. But looking out my office window, I can see those bricks, and I can remember those sunny days with Mom and Grandma. I can close my eyes and recall the dark days and the bright days alike. Like the Wall Street cycle of ups and downs, I have a tangible reminder that life itself is an unending ebb and flow.

Events change, people change, and the markets vacillate. However, the bricks remind me that some things do remain. Love, kindness, optimism, courage, resilience, and the strength and power of the human will. Wall Street and Saginaw Street are for me, inextricably linked. It’s always darkest before the dawn, but the dawn always comes. For me that is a life lesson that I hope everyone can remember. Because whether it’s investing or life, in good times and bad, it’s useful to remember that ‘this too shall pass’. More importantly, the message is that while we can’t control the wind we can always adjust our sails. Because in the end, it’s not what happens to us, but how we respond that makes all the difference. From my vantage point on the bricks it’s an easy philosophy to understand.