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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WHEN I WATCHED MY FIRST ZIG ZIGLAR SPEECH last year at Reunion Arena in Dallas—one of more than 18,000 people packed in for one of the Peter Lowe Success Seminars—I, too, found myself unable to take my eyes off him. He came out on the stage and started grinning at us so eagerly that people started to chuckle. In his dark pinstriped suit he looked like a cross between a bible thumper and a luxury-car salesman. Then, in his comic Southern-fried drawl, he said, “Let me ask you, how many of you have either heard me before—or else this is your first time-uh? May I see your hands-uh?”
Suddenly, he was off and running, coming at us so fast with quips, anecdotes, and factoids that we barely had time to absorb it all. In rapid-fire sequence he told us the man-with-the-wedding-ring joke, segued into one-liners about his past attempts at losing weight (“I once dieted so religiously I quit eating in church”), then explained that he didn’t slim down until he devised an adequate plan to do so, then told us that research proves that if we set up an organized program of goals for our lives, we’ll earn more than twice as much money as people who don’t. He strode to the middle of the stage, held out his arms like a father wanting to hug his wayward children, and boomed, “Let me ask you a question-uh. How many of you sincerely believe that there is something you can specifically do in the next three weeks to make your personal life, family life, and business life better? How many of you believe your future is in your hands-uh?”
I squirmed in my seat. Was this as deep as it was going to get? Did he really think we didn’t know that the future was in our hands? But the man never let up. “You can have everything you want if you help other people get what they want,” he said. He got down on one knee to make his point about how we must start working on our dreams. He told us that God wanted us to be financial successes but that we must also be successful in our relationships and in our spiritual lives. He told us that if we wanted to break from our “stinkin’ thinkin’,” we had to change our “mental diet” by immersing ourselves in positive thinking. He suggested that we listen to motivational tapes whenever we got into our cars, that we engage in “positive self-talk” to encourage ourselves to overcome life’s obstacles. His inspirational ditties came as fast as machine-gun fire: “I want you to get more of the things money will buy and all the things money won’t buy.…Failure is an event, not a person.…” His smile got bigger. He looked around the room, then let fly one of his oldest chestnuts: “You can go where you want to go, do what you want do, and be like you want to be-uh!”
Now this is embarrassing, I thought. But when I looked around the hall, I saw that people were transfixed. How does this guy do it? “I’ve asked myself many times how Zig can say the same things people have been hearing all their lives, and instead of getting yawns he gets a tremendous response,” says his good friend Fred Smith, a former Fortune 500 executive who admits to being “more cynical” than Ziglar. “I think he’s a little like Billy Graham, who has never really departed from the same sermon he was giving back in his twenties yet who’s never lost any effectiveness. After all these years, Zig still devotes every day to living this life he talks about, to applying some eternal truths about character, commitment, hard work, and self-determination.” “When you look at Zig,” Peter Lowe says, “you know that you’re looking at the last of a breed. The world just doesn’t create people like him anymore.”
When Ziglar’s speech was over, hundreds of people lined up in the halls to buy copies of his audiotapes; many plunked down $1,595 to buy his entire package of tapes, books, and other materials, which he had called “a very special offer.” In a large room outside the arena a couple hundred more fans lined up to meet and hug him, get his autograph, and tell him all the things he had done for them. Many told him how often they had heard him speak. Larry Carpenter of St. Louis, who credited Ziglar with inspiring him to leave his job as a diesel-truck mechanic and open his own commercial real estate company and billboard businesses—which now boast more than $10 million in net assets—later told me that he had attended the Born to Win seminar for eighteen consecutive years. Leland Heller, a South Florida physician, told me he was using Ziglar’s tapes to help patients who had suicidal tendencies or borderline personalities. “Don’t laugh,” he said. “I believe Ziglar’s work is going to be one of the most important contributions ever made to mental health. We’ve learned counseling doesn’t make you happy. Studying your past doesn’t make you happy. Acting happy makes you happy—and who is a better example of that than Zig?”
Maybe that’s true. I do know that thirty minutes after I left Reunion Arena, I had already forgotten much of what Ziglar had said in his speech, as had, I suspect, much of the other people in the audience. But it was difficult, I had to admit, to forget Ziglar himself. For more than a quarter of a century he has endured endless ribbing about his irrepressible boosterism and his schlocky euphemisms, his opportunity clock and his Personal Performance Planner, and his sentences in his books that end in exclamation marks. Yet he soldiers on, unabashedly old-fashioned, still living his life with what Fred Smith calls “an almost genetic positiveness.”
INDEED, A FEW WEEKS AFTER HIS DALLAS SPEECH, Ziglar traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had been invited to speak as part of the Harvard Law School Forum’s lecture series. Over the years, the student-run Forum had brought in some of the country’s most esteemed leaders, including Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. But Zig Ziglar? Was this someone’s idea of a joke? As it turned out the Forum’s vice president in charge of finding speakers, Jon Rose, a second-year student from western Kentucky, was a Ziglar fan. A few years earlier he had begun to listen to Zig tapes, which, he openly told others, helped him live a better life. Once he joined the Forum, he had written to Ziglar, who agreed to waive his $50,000 fee and speak at Harvard for free.
On a late afternoon this past fall nearly one hundred students—far fewer than the five hundred who showed up for the lecture by Charlton Heston on gun control—came to Harvard’s historic Langdell Hall. On the wall behind the podium hung oil paintings of some of history’s most brilliant legal minds, from John Marshall to Louis Brandeis. There in front of them stood Ziglar in his dark business suit, smiling eagerly at his young audience. “Let me ask you a question-uh,” he said. “How many of you have either heard me before—or else this is your first time-uh? May I see your hands-uh?”
There was an uncomfortable silence. No hands went up. For the next few minutes, a couple of students stroked their goatees, others arched their eyebrows, and still others exchanged looks of absolute disbelief as Ziglar laid down his standard rap, his arms waving back and forth, his chin thrust upward, and his head pulled back. “You are designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the seeds of greatness!” he told the nation’s best and brightest young thinkers, who stared at him as if he were an exotic tribal leader from a primitive country.
Ziglar, however, was unfazed, and as the speech went on, no one got up to leave. Some students leaned forward in their chairs, their eyes trained on him. His jokes began to get a few laughs. And when he finished, there was polite applause; a few people even hung around to ask him questions. Although Rose was disappointed by the turnout, he did what Ziglar would have wanted him to do: He put the best face on the situation. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think anyone here will ever forget who Zig Ziglar is.”
And Ziglar intends to make sure that no one else forgets him, either. He told me he hopes to maintain a full schedule for at least the next decade. He plans to speak to close to 400,000 people a year at various venues, including his regular Sunday school class at Prestonwood Baptist Church in North Dallas, where you can hear for free what corporations pay him $50,000 to say to their employees. He’s already writing new books—one about how to get our nation’s political leaders to develop better values and think more positively, another a humor book that he wants to title Conversations With My Dog.
“I’ve got a lot to do before being taken up,” he told me in his office, rubbing his hands together with excitement as I stood up and headed out. “Yes, a lot to do.”
Suddenly he looked at his watch and smiled. It was almost time for his round of golf. Today, he really did believe, he was going to break 70.
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