Zig Ziglar, upbeat motivational speaker and author, dies
at 86
Copied from Washington Post Article
In Zig Ziglar’s world, the morning alarm rang on
the “opportunity clock.” And “if you aren’t on fire” when you get to work, “then
your wood is wet.” And you have to remember that “money’s not the most important
thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen.” And there will be setbacks,
but “failure is an event, not a person.”
Mr. Ziglar, a motivational speaker whose “Success Rallies,” “Born to Win”
seminars, more than 25 self-help books and countless audiotapes attracted
millions of devoted followers with homespun advice on career advancement and
moral uplift, died Nov. 28 at a hospital in the Dallas suburb of Plano. He was
86.
He had pneumonia, said his executive assistant, Laurie Magers.
Rising by one’s bootstraps through the “power of positive thinking” has long
been a compelling narrative in American lore. Few messengers of prosperity have
been able to sustain a relentlessly upbeat and lucrative career for as long as
Zig Ziglar.
Zig Ziglar! A human exclamation point! The world’s most popular
motivational speaker, as he was often described, was always excited because
“you never judge a day by the weather!”
He was a presence at corporate retreats and conferences for firms such as IBM
and J.C. Penney. For the general public, some people paid $49 to hear him live
or $1,595 to buy his complete written and audio package. He won over crowds with
his faith-filled proverbs and earnest metaphors about setting goals and facing
down adversity.
“If you’re going to have to swallow a frog,” he said in his Southern drawl,
“you don’t want to have to look at that sucker too long!”
Or: “You can get everything in life you want if you will just help other
people get what they want!”
Or: “Have you ever noticed that people who are the problem never realize it?
They’re in denial. They think denial is a river in Egypt!”
Or: “The more you gripe about your problems, the more problems you have to
gripe about!”
What his words lacked in depth, they made up for in conviction.
“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,” his friend Fred Smith, the former FedEx chief executive, told Texas
Monthly in 1999.
“I think he’s a little like Billy Graham, who has never really departed from
the same sermon he was giving back in his 20s yet who’s never lost any
effectiveness,” Smith said. “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.”
For his most fervent admirers, Mr. Ziglar was an inspiring leader who every
morning leapt out of bed to the opportunity clock, bussed his wife (“Hey, Sugar
Baby”), and willed himself into a positive mindset by seldom lingering on crime
stories and celebrity gossip while scanning his morning newspaper.
Texas Monthly described Mr. Ziglar’s love of comic strips, stories about
sports teams that win and human interest tales that touched on the miraculous.
He clipped them out and stored them in a file cabinet brimming with anecdotes
about people who overcame disabilities and poverty and made it to state
championships and the executive suite.
“Isn’t it amazing,” he told Texas Monthly, “how
we are designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the
seeds of greatness?”
Advancement in all its forms appealed to Hilary Hinton Ziglar, who was the
10th of 12 children born in rural Coffee County, Ala., on Nov. 6, 1926. He was
raised by his widowed mother in Yazoo City, Miss.
He described his mother as the foremost influence on his life, a strict and
devout woman whose mental storehouse of adages (“The person who won’t stand for
something will fall for anything”) remained a cornerstone of Mr. Ziglar’s
speeches and writings.
After Navy service at the end in World War II, he was married in 1946 to Jean
Abernathy. He attended the University of South Carolina, but he was a middling
student and left to work as a door-to-door cookware salesman.
As he was promoted through the ranks of the company, Mr. Ziglar became drawn
to the power of self-help speakers and their ability to influence others. He
began giving talks at church and Rotary Club meetings, often reprising his
mother’s advice and relating his own experiences of smiling through setbacks and
grief.
He settled in the Dallas area by the late 1960s, initially for a job training
workers at a direct-sales company. The business soon folded, but the demand for
Mr. Ziglar’s speaking had intensified. He launched a business called the
Zigmanship Institute, now simply known as Ziglar Inc.
His first book, “Biscuits, Fleas, and Pump Handles,” published in 1974 and
later retitled “See You at the Top,” urged readers to re-evaluate their lives
with a “checkup from the neck up” and to quit their “stinkin’ thinkin.’ ”
Mr. Ziglar spoke often of his religious awakening in 1972 and invoked his
faith in book titles such as “Confessions of a Happy Christian” (1978) and
“Confessions of a Grieving Christian” (1998), which he wrote after the death of
his eldest daughter, Suzan Witmeyer, from pulmonary fibrosis in 1995.
His other books included “Courtship After Marriage” (1990) and “Staying Up,
Up, Up in a Down, Down World” (2000). He wrote a memoir in 2002.
Mr. Ziglar, who sometimes earned tens of thousands of dollars per speech and
other times waived his fee, kept up a rigorous touring schedule until retiring
in 2010.
Besides his wife, of Plano, survivors include three children, Cindy Ziglar
Oates of Southlake, Tex., motivational author Julie Ziglar Norman of Alvord, Tex., and Tom Ziglar, who
is now chief executive of Plano-based Ziglar Inc.; seven grandchildren; 12
great-grandchildren; and a great-great-grandson.
Mr. Ziglar adapted his maxims to every aspect of his life, not least the golf
course. Every day, he sought to break 70 but never did.
“Yesterday ended last night,” he liked to tell himself. “Today is a brand-new
day. And it’s yours.”
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