Personal Success in Shepard and Gardner
Adam Shepard's Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream and Chris Gardner's The Pursuit of Happyness are both stories of personal success attained by surviving challenging times. Both men write about their quest to realize the American Dream in their own lives. While Shepard's experience was merely an experiment, Gardner's was a lived experience that reflects the anguish, sacrifice, and hard work that went into his rise from poverty to a successful life as a stockbroker. Among the many sterling qualities needed by both men in order to succeed were resourcefulness and determination, and this paper will discuss how they leveraged these qualities to attain their personal success.
Resourcefulness is the ability to overcome obstacles or solve difficult problems by using one's creativity and imagination to come up with unique solutions. Both Shepard and Gardner are faced with the prospect of having nowhere to sleep at some point and needing to find somewhere safe. Shepard (2) states, "My first order of business was to find a comfortable place to sleep. Shoot, it didn't even have to be a comfortable place to sleep-just a place, a relatively safe place." After a hair-raising journey on foot to get there, Shepard finally ends up at a homeless shelter, Crisis Ministries, which-although it offers better accommodations than sleeping on the street-cannot be deemed more than just "relatively safe." As Shepard (11) relates the rules there, "All guest bags should be labeled. Crisis Ministries will not be responsible for lost or stolen items."
In Gardner's film, Chris's resourcefulness is far greater than that of Shepard, the difference being that Gardner is a desperate man, on the verge of losing everything he has, which is already very little, while Shepard, a man with a college education, can end his experiment at will. When Chris and his you