I recently watched the movie, ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ for the first time and loved it, I recommend everyone go watch it if you have not already seen it. Will Smith is the main character ‘Chris Gardner’ in this movie and he is a salesman that is barely making ends meet and struggling to pay for rent, parking tickets, etc. However, one day he is walking down the street and a good looking car pulls into a parking space and his curiosity causes him to approach the man and ask him, “what do you do, and how do you do it?” He was a stock broker and told the man that all he had to do was be great with numbers and great with people if he wanted to be a stock broker. This then causes Chris to seek out an internship where only 40 interns were selected out of hundreds of applicants and then only one of those people get the job at the end of the internship. The chances were slim to none, but Chris had to take a leap of faith and bet on himself. Chris is in many sales pitches and opportunities during this movie but I think one of my favorite scenes is when he goes in front of the partners for an interview to get the internship. He came with paint on his face an in his hair and to quote the movie, “dressed as a garbage man”. This is because he was in jail the night before for unpaid parking tickets. He went into that meeting dressed poorly, with no experience, and no qualifications but he was making a sale as soon as he walked into the room, he was selling himself. He had to pitch to them that has was the person they should hire and sell what he had to offer to the company. He successfully did that, and I think that was may more impressive than any other sale he made in that movie. What we can take from this is that sometimes you don’t need to sell a product or the qualifications for something, often times you just need to sell ‘You’ to the buyer. Many times they care about the person more than the product, or the relationship more than the special features or qualifications that might be offered.
BoweryJE22 One thought on “Blog post #3 (The Pursuit of Happiness)”
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This is such a great film for anyone to watch. Regardless where you are in life this movie can apply. Whether if you need to understand that you have to sell yourself or that you need to be humbled. We see someone who is really down and out, but it is that persistence that leads to a breakthrough. The unwillingness to give up and never to count yourself out is so important to see, especially for people in sales. We will fail time and again, we will be laid out on our backs so many times, but it is all about getting up and trying again. Whenever that breakthrough happens, all that hard work will pay off.