Are you willing to fight Murphy’s law?

By raheem

I am reading The Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner.  I have watched the movie starring Will Smith several times before and picked up the book from an upper west side dump – luckily for me, its a signed copy. A section of the book caught my attention today.

This is the part where Chris Gardner is trying to become a stock broker. He is facing several obstacles including having no college degree, being black, no industry experience, no connection, and no related skills. These ordinary obstacles are sufficient to break most normal resolve. However Chris faced additional hurdles. He had quit one job when he received an offer to join the training program of a brokerage house. But when he shows up on Monday morning, no one seems to have a clue about why he is there. He finds out that the man who had offered him the position was fired the week before. Around the same time, his wife walked out with his child and left him homeless. As if things could not get worse, the police arrested him just days before an interview at Dean Witter for unpaid parking tickets. Through all this, Chris Gardner was never willing to give up. He refers to those series of events as “the perfect example of Murphy’s Law.” He finally makes it thru the training program, the exam and gets an offer. But his ordeals continue. Here is an excerpt from one of those moments, when he and his son live in a shady motel:

Every now and then, kindness sprang up out of nowhere, and in the least likely places, as it did one evening when we came back to The Palms and one of the sisters working the street approached us. She and her colleagues had seen me and Christopher in the stroller every morning and night and probably figured out our deal. A black man with a little boy in a stroller, a single dad – it wasn’t anything they’d seen before.

“Hey, little player, little pimp,” she said as she came close, a candy bar in her hand to give to Christopher. “Here you go.”

“No, no,” I insisted, maintaining Jackie’s rule against sugar, “he don’t need any candy.”

Christopher, unfortunately, was dissappointed and started to cry. “Don’t cry,” she said and reached down into her magical cleavage and produced a $5 bill, handing that to him.

The same sister and a couple of other ladies of the night started giving Christopher $5 bills on a regular basis. In fact, there were some days when we wouldn’t have eaten without their help. At my hungriest moments, when we were running on empty, I would roll the stroller by their stretch of the sidewalk, on purpose, moving real slow just in case one of the familiar faces were working the street yet. There was a purity in the help these women gave us, with nothing asked in return. Kindess, pure and simple.”

Sometimes that is what entrepreneurship boils down to – a determination to survive and prevail over an unrelenting Murphy’s Law. Are you willing to sign up for such a fight?