A Teacher
Zig Ziglar
Attitude, not aptitude, determines altitude
The transmission
Hilary Hinton “Zig” Ziglar was born on November 6, 1926, in Coffee County, Alabama, and grew up in Yazoo City, Mississippi, the tenth of twelve children, after his father’s early death left the family in hard circumstances.
He spent his early career as a traveling cookware salesman, where a sales manager named P. C. Merrell convinced him that he had unrealized capacity — an encounter Ziglar credited with changing his self-image and launching his rise as a top salesman.
From sales he moved into sales training and, by the 1970s, into full-time motivational speaking. His signature book, See You at the Top (first published in 1975 after being rejected by numerous publishers), laid out a folksy, faith-inflected program for success built on self-image, goals, and a positive attitude, and went on to sell millions of copies.
Across more than thirty books and decades on the lecture circuit, Ziglar became one of America’s best-known motivational speakers, famous for homespun aphorisms — “you can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want” — and for explicitly weaving his Christian faith into his message.
He continued speaking into his eighties and died on November 28, 2012. His teaching belongs to the practical, character-and-attitude wing of success literature, light on metaphysics and heavy on self-image and service.
What they gave
Self-image as foundation: Builds his system on the conviction that a person’s inner picture of themselves sets the ceiling on performance — a popular restatement of the self-image psychology running through the genre.
- Attitude over aptitude: Crystallizes the positive-mental-attitude doctrine in memorable, repeatable form for a mass audience of salespeople and ordinary readers.
- Goals plus service: Couples explicit goal-setting with an ethic of helping others get what they want, giving the success message a relational and moral dimension.
- Faith-integrated motivation: Openly fuses Christian belief with success teaching, anchoring the tradition for a large religious readership.
In their words
You are what you are and where you are because of what has gone into your mind. You can change what you are and where you are by changing what goes into your mind.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: his early sales mentor P. C. Merrell; Norman Vincent Peale’s positive-thinking Christianity; Napoleon Hill and the success tradition; his own evangelical faith.
- Influenced: the modern motivational-speaking and sales-training industry; the faith-friendly wing of the self-help market; later inspirational authors and speakers.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- See You at the Top1975
- Secrets of Closing the Sale1984