Zig Ziglar

Before millions knew him from seminar stages and shelves of success books, Hilary Hinton “Zig” Ziglar was the youngest boy in a crowded Alabama household. Born prematurely in Coffee County, Alabama, on November 6, 1926, he was the tenth of 12 children of John Silas Ziglar and Lila Wescott Ziglar. When he was five, the family moved to Yazoo City, Mississippi, after his father took a management position on a farm. A year later, Ziglar’s father died of a stroke, and his younger sister died two days after that. His mother was left to raise the family alone, with what he described as only a fifth-grade education, though he said she had “graduated magna cum laude from the university of life.”

That early picture helps explain the moral texture of Ziglar’s later message. He grew up around hardship, plain speech, and a mother who, by his account, “had a saying for everything.” Between 1943 and 1945, he took part in the Navy V-12 Navy College Training Program at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. During that period he met Jean Abernathy. They met in 1944 in Jackson, Mississippi, when he was 17 and she was 16, and they married in late 1946. Together they had four children: Suzan, Tom, Cindy, and Julie.

Ziglar left college in 1947 and moved to Lancaster, South Carolina, where he became a salesman for WearEver Cookware. The first two years were financially difficult for him and Jean, but he kept an optimistic attitude. Sales became both his work and his classroom. By 1950, he had been promoted to field manager and then divisional supervisor. While still working in the company world, he became interested in self-help and motivational speaking, and began giving speeches of his own.

In 1963, Ziglar joined Richard “Dick” Gardner and Hal Krause as a charter member of American Salesmasters, a company formed to raise the image of salespeople in America through seminars. They took their programs to cities across the South and Midwest, including Memphis, Atlanta, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, and Denver, with speakers such as Norman Vincent Peale, Maxwell Maltz, Cavett Robert, and Ziglar himself. Their audiences included insurance agents, car salesmen, financial advisors, entrepreneurs, small-business owners, and the merely curious. Ziglar later spoke widely for the National Association of Sales Education and became a major sales trainer for Mary Kay Cosmetics.

After a brief role beginning in 1968 as vice president and training director for the Automotive Performance Company in Dallas, followed by that company’s bankruptcy two years later, Ziglar built his own platform. In 1977, he founded the Zigmanship Institute, later known as Ziglar, Inc. He spoke at seminars, trained other speakers, and wrote more than 30 books. Among his best-known titles are See You at the Top, Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale, Top Performance, Over the Top, Selling 101, The Autobiography of Zig Ziglar, and Born to Win, co-written with his son Tom. In 1994, Tom Ziglar became CEO of the company.

Ziglar was also open about his Baptist faith, saying he was baptized a Christian on Independence weekend in 1972 and that he claimed July 4 as his “born again day.” He integrated Christianity into his motivational work, tying success to honesty, character, integrity, faith, love, and loyalty. A fall down a flight of stairs in 2007 left him with short-term memory problems, but he continued taking part in motivational seminars until retiring in 2010. He died of pneumonia on November 28, 2012, in Plano, Texas. His words still appeal because they are practical and hopeful: “Motivation gets you going and habit gets you there” sounds less like a slogan than a working rule for ordinary days.