How Many of You Have Heard of Zig Ziglar Before—Or Is This Your First Time-uh?
Twenty-five years after See You at the Top, the nation’s most motivated motivational speaker is still a huge draw, filling arenas and pulling in $50,000 per speech. Norman Vincent Peale, eat your heart out.
tim says: Great article capturing the essence of Mr. Ziglar and how he continues to influence people-and, yes, I’m proud to say I’m one of them. (May 20th, 2009 at 10:53am)
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His other books, which have such titles as Raising Positive Kids in a Negative World and Courtship After Marriage, exuberantly address almost every other aspect of life. In his most recent tome, Confessions of a Grieving Christian—written after the death of his eldest daughter, Suzan—he explained how to stay cheerful and optimistic even during the most tragic of circumstances. (“We hear tears loudly on this side of heaven,” he wrote. “What we don’t take time to contemplate are the even louder cheers on the other side of death’s valley.”) He also records numerous audiotapes on such Zig-like subjects as “How to Stay Motivated” and “Building a Healthy Self-Image.” And if that’s not enough, there are his personal appearances. Several times a year he puts on a three-day, $1,495-per-person Born to Win seminar, which he calls his “most powerful, positive, life-changing seminar ever.” He’s even started a company, Ziglar Training Systems, that offers other educational programs and workshops featuring him or his handpicked surrogates.
But is there really still an audience out there for Zig Ziglar? Hasn’t he made his point many times over about the power of positive living? “Oh, yes, everyone asks me when I’m going to retire,” he told me soon after we met at his corporate office—after he shook my hand and patted me on the back and said how “good-uh” it was to see me, after he introduced me to his receptionist (who enthusiastically answers the phone every time it rings with the phrase “It’s a great day at Ziglar Training Systems!”), his longtime secretary (“A woman who never graduated from high school but who, because of her self-taught knowledge, has scored higher on evaluation tests than people who have received master’s degrees,” he said with pride), and half a dozen of his staffers (all of whom said to me, “Good morning!”), and after he spent twenty minutes showing me his Wall of Gratitude, which displays black-and-white photos of the most influential people in his life, from the man who gave him his first job as a boy to other motivational speakers who encouraged him. He chuckled softly, then pumped his fist into the air like a prizefighter. “Retire? But I’m just getting re-fired. Believe me, I’m not going to ease up, slow up, or give up until I’m taken up.”
In fact, Ziglar is in such demand these days by corporations and conventions that he is able to charge an astonishing $50,000 per speech—and he speaks about fifty times a year. Although the New York Times doesn’t review his books, See You at the Top, which he publishes himself, is now in its fifty-sixth printing, and according to Ziglar, has sold more than 1.5 million copies. His fourteen other books have sold more than three million copies, and he has sold an estimated ten million audiotapes.
“In some ways he’s more popular than ever,” says Peter Lowe, who uses Ziglar as the morning keynote speaker at his wildly popular Peter Lowe Success Seminars, the daylong motivational programs that are held at sports arenas around the country and attended by sales reps who are overwhelmed by hearing the word “no,” self-employed entrepreneurs who need a spark to get going each morning, and wannabe business tycoons who are just plain fond of robust, feel-good messages. “Of all the great people who speak at our seminars, from Christopher Reeve to Norman Schwarzkopf to Colin Powell, Zig still gets the best response. It’s like he knows how to reach people in a way that no one else can.”
HILARY HINTON “ZIG” ZIGLAR GREW up in tiny Yazoo City, Mississippi, during the Great Depression. He was raised by his widowed mother—“A woman who finished only the fifth grade,” he told me reverently, “but who without a doubt graduated magna cum laude from the university of life.” If you talk to Ziglar for any amount of time, he will no doubt tell you a story about his mother, the kind of strict, religious Southerner who had a saying for almost every situation in life. “It’s not who’s right that’s important; it’s what’s right,” she would tell her twelve children. Ziglar apparently remembers every last word she uttered. To this day, some of the best lines in his speeches—“The person who won’t stand for something will fall for anything”; “If you set the example, you will not have to set the rules”—are hers.
He didn’t grow up thinking he wanted to be a motivational speaker: He wanted to own his own butcher shop in Yazoo City. While serving in the Navy, he met a pretty young Mississippian named Jean Abernathy, and two years later he married her. Upon his release from the service, he enrolled at the University of South Carolina. But he was not a good student—“I was in that part of the class that made the top half possible”—and he soon quit school after finding a job. He found one selling cookware door-to-door, though for two years he barely avoided bankruptcy. “About the only things I sold during that period were my car and my furniture,” he admits. Still, he always talked to Jean about how good things were and how much better off they were going to be. “He never once let on that there were days when he had only fifty cents to his name,” she says. “He’d put on his suit, give me a kiss, tell me how much he loved me, and then off he’d go.”
Sometimes Ziglar could only afford a couple gallons of gas. Undeterred, he decided that wherever his car rolled to a stop was where he would start working door-to-door. He made sure always to keep a smile on his face, and regardless of how poor his sales were, he refused to show disappointment of any kind when he got home. In fact, he was so committed to thinking good thoughts that he forbade Jean and their four kids from expressing negative feelings around the house. They couldn’t even say the word “yuck” if they ate something they disliked at the dinner table.
The concept of positive thinking dates back long before Ziglar, of course. In the twenties a Frenchman named Emile Coué caught the attention of anxious Americans by telling them to repeat the affirmation: “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” By the thirties a young New York minister, Norman Vincent Peale, was already preaching the importance of a positive mental outlook; those sermons became the basis for his motivational masterpiece, The Power of Positive Thinking. But who really followed these principles every day? Zig Ziglar of Yazoo City, Mississippi, did. He would give himself what he called “self-talks,” in which he’d stand in front of the mirror and say such things as “I am an optimistic, punctual, enthusiastic, goal-setting, smart-working self-starter!” He would tell himself that it takes 72 muscles to frown but only 14 to smile. He would say that he was a member of “the smile and compliment club” and that it was his duty to give everyone a smile and a compliment no matter how unfairly they had treated him. “I know there had to be times when he was frustrated and upset, but I never saw it,” says his youngest son, Tom, who is the president of Ziglar Training Systems. “If there was a business crisis, all he’d say was ‘Well, I’m just going to have to work harder.’”
Eventually his door-to-door sales began to increase, and in 1952, at the age of 25, he was named a divisional supervisor in the cookware company. Not long afterward he heard a motivational speaker give the standard rousing speech about the joys of success. “I never saw a man have so much fun in his life and do so much good,” Ziglar told me. “And I knew right then what it was that I wanted to do next.” It wasn’t what you’d call an obvious career choice for him. All he had done in his business life was sell cookware—not the sort of background that brings out a crowd for a speech. Yet one of the most intriguing aspects about the American self-help movement is that audiences care little about the résumé of a speaker or a writer. They simply want to be inspired, to be told in a persuasive way that their failures are temporary.
Zig Ziglar was convinced that he was just the person to deliver such a message. He kept his day job selling cookware—he later moved into sales training—but at nights he began traveling to churches, schools, and Lions and Rotary clubs, where he gave his first motivational speeches for free. He’d tell a few stories about himself as a salesman, repeat some of his mother’s lines and other quotations he had memorized, offer the basic techniques for self-improvement that other motivational speakers had been using for years (figure out what your goals in life are, write them down, commit yourself to achieving them, and then aggressively work on them every day), and end with a call for everyone listening to build a healthy self-image and believe in themselves too. He relied on folksy metaphors to make his points about staying motivated (“You don’t drown by falling into water. You only drown if you stay there”), told silly jokes about people who weren’t making changes in their lives (“I recently met a man who was wearing his wedding band on the wrong hand, and when I asked him why, he told me, ‘I married the wrong woman.’”), and repeated more than his share of stirring anecdotes about uneducated people who taught themselves to read and poor people who worked hard to become rich.
In 1968 he moved from South Carolina to Dallas to take a high-paying job as a trainer for a direct-sales company, but within two years, the company went bankrupt. No matter: He was getting so many requests to speak that he decided to try it full-time. Audiences were mesmerized by him, and they’ve stayed mesmerized—despite the fact that his shtick has pretty much remained the same.
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