 Welcome to the Leader's Room. My name is Michael Costner and it's my pleasure to be your host today. The Leader's Room is an initiative of the E. Cliff Leadership and Governance Center. In this space, we bring together leaders from around the world to talk about their philosophy of leadership, to talk about the values, sense of purpose, and mindset that drives them to be successful. Today, we're really fortunate to talk with Chris Gardner, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and man of success. His story has been characterized like a racially alger novel of riches to rags and rags to riches type of story. Today we'll be talking with Chris and about his incredible experience and his life today. Chris, welcome to the Leader's Room. Michael, how you doing? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, man. You know what? That introduction was so cool, but that part about going from riches to rags, I don't want to think about that part. I don't want to see that part, all right. I have seen this one video clip of you, Chris, where you're in the back of a taxi and the guy asks, you know, how much money do you have in your pocket? And you start counting out the bills and you say, and the guy says, I'm like, you don't have any small bills? And you say, I like cash, so that tells me something about it. You know what? You're talking to a guy, and I know your word is, we're at one point having ten extra dollars was a big deal. Ten extra dollars, man. I could breathe for a minute, right? And so, yeah, I even paid. So Chris, for our listeners and viewers, can you give us a two or three minute kind of synopsis of the other story? I don't know if I can do that succinctly, but I can't say this. What I do know is that it's not about me. It is a universal story of everyone who ever was given permission to dream. Everyone who ever was given permission that, well, you can do this. You can be this. Giving that permission and took it and believed it and have been blessed to at this point, not just giving it to my children, but being in a position to give it to another generation and to share that permission to dream all around the world. And that's why I'm honored to be here in Kuala Lumpur today with you. And I say that in all sincerity. People ask me a lot of times, well, where are you going next or where have you been? Doesn't matter. All I know is right here, right now, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and I'm absolutely honored to be here. So thank you again for having me. Thank you. So Chris, what drives you? What are the values that underpin everything that you do? Let me answer that question this way. Let me tell you about the two biggest decisions I ever made in my life. Number one, I made a decision as a five-year-old boy that when I grow up becoming a man and have children, my children are going to know who their father is. That became the most important decision that I've ever made in my life. And that's the reason we're sitting here right now having this conversation. Number two, because I was given permission to dream from my mom, I made another decision and that decision was I was going to become world-class at whatever I did in my life. Not good at it, not pretty good at it, but world-class at it. And when you say what drives me, that's what drives me to this day. And if not the most important thing in the world for me right now personally, I want to see myself in my 2.0 version. I want to see the 2.0 version of me mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually and financially. I want to see me hitting on all 12 cylinders. I've hit on 8 out of 12, 9 out of 12, I've hit on 10 out of 12, but I don't know if I've ever hit on all 12 cylinders simultaneously on command. So that's what drives me. So at E-Click we talk a lot about leadership energy and that there are three sources of leadership energy. One's values, which is a question I started to ask you about. One sense of purpose, why am I here and the other is the mindset. In your book, The Pursuit of Happiness, you talk about a defining moment in 1970. You're sitting there watching a March Madness game and you make some comment and kind of paraphrasing here. Those guys are going to end up making a million dollars someday. And from a room next door where your mother's working, she makes a comment about... She changes the world for me. I'm getting ready to watch. It's a college basketball game. And the announcer is hyping the game. He's talking about all the money. Some of these players are going to make simply because they can run and jump and catch a ball. And I said, talking to the television, I said, wow man, one day that guy's going to make a million dollars. Thank God, Michael, my mom heard me say it because she said, son, if you want to, one day you can make a million dollars. Whoa. Until she said those words, the thought never ended my mind. After she said them, the thought never left my mind. That I become part of what I call my spiritual genetics. She went on to say the most remarkable thing, which was, son, if you want to make the team, go to the gym. If you want to own the team, go to the library. Whoa. You know what makes this so remarkable, right? This moment today is earlier this year. I failed in an attempt to buy an NBA franchise. I'll put together a group to buy the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association. We bid $700 million. Second highest price ever offered for an NBA franchise and lost. I'm like, Mom, you didn't tell me about this part. But you know what, that was okay because that was practice. That was practice. Quincy Jones once said to me, the best singing that he ever heard was Michael Jackson at practice. Phil Jackson once said, the best basketball he ever saw was Michael Jordan at practice. I like practice. I'll be back. So what are you practicing for? I'll be back. That's all I'm going to say. I'll be back. Trust me. Remember, we had this conversation, OK? OK, all right, OK. So your values, your mother said, you know, dream big. Dream whatever you want to dream and believe that you can achieve that. Actualizing that is something else. And along the way, you know, you're noted for having run into a lot of barriers and hurdles that you had to overcome. Where people literally said, why do you have the audacity to dream those types of things? Yeah, how did you overcome that? I didn't listen to them. You don't listen to them. I could hear the voice. I could hear my mom's voice. I could hear those words. You can do or be anything. I will also never forget hearing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once say he was speaking to a group of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. As a matter of fact, it was the night before he was assassinated. And he was saying to these garbage men, whatever you're going to do with your life, you should seek to become the best at it. His exact words were, if you're going to be a garbage man, you should seek to become the best garbage man. Those lessons from my mom, those words from Dr. King, I knew all I got to do was find my button. What is that one thing that just turns me on? And I talk to people about this all around the world. And the truth is, I cannot tell anyone how to find their button. But I do know this. A lot of us already know we're just afraid to push it. Why do you think that is? We're afraid to push it because some people might not dig it. Some people might not say it's OK. Some people are going to say, you're going to do what? Why are you going to do that? Forget that. We've got people in this room right now, journalists. At some point, somebody in this room made a decision, I'm going to be a journalist. I'm going to be a writer. And at some point, somebody in their lives probably said to them, a what? A writer. How are you going to pay the rent? Who's a writer? But we've got journalists sitting here right now because they believed. You've got to be able to see it with the eyes in your soul. You might not physically be able to see it. But if you see it with the eyes in your soul, nobody's got to dig it but you. And I don't mean that in a disrespectful way. Nobody's got to dig it but you, man. And I have to tell you, I've just been so blessed, Michael. And I'm so thankful and humble. And I will never, ever, ever be able to repay some of the blessings that I've been given because I was able to convince some others that, yeah, I can do this if you give me the opportunity, all right? I mean, I don't want to belabor the point but I'm thinking of two guys that 30 years ago gave me an opportunity to work on Wall Street where nobody else would. Those two guys today are two of my best friends. So Chris, I'm imagining though that there's some people either watching or listening to this recording that are saying this guy is way too positive. It could have been as easy as it almost sounds like. Who said it was easy? Okay, so there had been at least one dark night of the soul in your journey, maybe multiple dark nights of the soul. Absolutely. How did you pull, what was the mindset, Chris, that pulled you out of that? I would say this at, okay, let's go back. Let's go back to a point in my life where I was at my absolute lowest emotionally, financially, spiritually, in the darkest moment, spending nights in that training station washroom with my little boy. What a lot of people don't know is in the film, Jayden Smith plays my son as a five-year-old. In reality, my son was 14 months old. He was still in diapers, right? And there was a highly polished piece of sheet metal over the sink. It wasn't a mirror, but it served as a mirror. And I had to wash my little boy every day and I had to ask myself, why did this happen? Why did that happen? What's going to happen next? The hardest question, Michael, I had to ask and answer every day was, how did I get here? And the answer was more brutal. The answer was, I drove here. I had something to do with the situations and circumstances that had become my life. I drove here. And there was something very empowering about that. Something very liberating because I knew the second I said, well, well, if I drove here, then I can drive out of here. You can't change something until you own it. I drove here. And people will say, well, he's just too positive. Look, I've had my dark days. I've had challenging times. I'm coming off of him, probably emotionally, the most challenging experience of my life. I lost the love of my life to brain cancer three years ago. And there's a darkness that comes with it. Yes, sir. But the light is, I had the honor of being there and being her primary caregiver. I had the honor of her knowing, no, baby, I'm right here. Is that Holly? Holly. So one of the things that I noticed earlier today when you were prepping for the conference that starts tomorrow, every time her picture came up, you just stood and you look there silently. Oh man. I was at the back of the auditorium thinking, what's the story behind that? It was Holly. It was Holly. And you know what, man, let me tell you something. 20 years and some of the last conversations that she and I were having was her saying to me, now that we can see how truly short life can be, what are you gonna do with the rest of your life? That's not just a rhetorical question at that point. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? What am I gonna do? I'm gonna start living my own advice. I've written books about it. I've talked about it. I said it here tonight. If you're doing something you're not truly passionate about, you're compromising yourself every single day. That's why I'm trying to get to the 2.0 version of me. What are you gonna do with the rest of your life? I'm gonna be the best me that I could possibly be. Okay. So you potentially are an inspiration to not only the people that are listening to our conversation, but the people that will hear you in the future. Who gives you your inspiration today? I know your mom. I know you're not mom. It was an important source of inspiration. It sure sounds like Holly was an important sense of inspiration. But for Chris Gardner today, who's your source of inspiration? Man, let me tell you something. I have something called a grandchild. A grandchild. Oh, man. First of all, you're talking to a guy who never knew his dad. Okay? Right. You're talking to a guy who's been a single parent, mother and father for 29 years. And my reward is I get to be grandpa. Oh my God. Man, that is the coolest job in the whole world. When you live to be long enough, old enough to meet your first grandchild, that changes everything. The first thing that changes is your child becomes obsolete. My son has one purpose in life. That's to bring my granddaughter to me. That's his one reason to live, right? Okay, he got no other reason to exist. Right. And to be in a position to having given the gift of permission to dream to my children, but now being able to give the gift of permission to dream to another generation and to be old enough to know better, but young enough to say, what the hell, let's just try to see what happens. All right? So what's the biggest dream your granddaughter has right now? She knows that if she wants to, she can become president of the United States. She knows because she's been to the White House. She sat at that desk and Mr. Obama told her that when you know if you do everything your papa tells you and you do real good at school and about 30 years, this office could be yours. And she looked at him and she says, no, it's 28 and a half because I'm seven and a half years old. She's figured it out, man, all right? And to have the opportunity to say, well, you know what, baby, if that's what you want to do, somebody got a chair to finance committee. That's my job. That's my job, you just go to school, we got this deal. You go to school and you do everything and you hit all these grades, papa got you covered. That's the beauty of it. There we go. One final question for you, sir. Given the journey that your life has taken, the twists and turns of it, when you look back, when you're 90 years old, when you look back over the course of your life, how will you define success? My daughter's sitting in the White House. My granddaughter's sitting in the White House and that's what she wants to do. Okay, number one, in all sincerity, I don't spend a whole lot of time looking back. I got my hands full, trying to make sure I'm real clear on where I'm going right now. I don't spend a whole lot of time back there. I had to let all that go, Mike. When we did, not just the movie, but when we did the book, The Pursuit of Happiness, let me tell you something. That was a very cathartic experience. Letting all that stuff go, okay? All that stuff you're carrying around in your head for a long time, letting all that stuff go and when you let go of stuff, that opens things up and you can see and you can breathe, right? And again, just coming out of this, the darkness of losing Holly emotionally, it's been a dark few years, man. I mean, I lost my mom. A lot of us have had that experience. We've lost a parent, we've lost a mother, we lost a father. That's part of the natural rhythm of life, right? That's gonna happen. When you lose your wife, you need to lose your lover. You also lost your best friend. That's a whole different situation, you know? But we're coming out of the dark and, let me tell you what I wanna do right now with a big part of my life. I want to find and help create the next Chris Gardner's and they're all over the planet. I wanna find and help create them and I'm doing it right now. On a small scale, but being given a platform. Well, I could sit here and talk to you for hours. You're an incredibly interesting man. I mean, that's sincerely from here. Hope we can stay in touch, but for right now, we're gonna have to sign off. So Chris, thanks for joining us in the Leader's Room. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you. This is Michael Kossler signing off from the Eclipse Leader's Room. We look forward to seeing you at the next edition.