Zig Ziglar speaks during one of his "Success Rallies" in the nation’s capital in June 1978. (Harry Naltchayan/The Washington Post) 
 
 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.” ||||| 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) Add your comment » 
 
 ZIG ZIGLAR, AMERICA’S MERCHANT OF HOPE, still wakes up every day before dawn, almost always before his “opportunity clock,” as he refers to his alarm clock, starts to ring. He leans over and kisses his wife, Jean, and makes sure to tell her the very same thing he has told her every morning of their 52-year marriage. “Hey, Sugar Baby,” he says in his molasses-sweet drawl. “I sure do love you.” He rises. He studies his Bible. He then opens a datebook that he calls his “personal performance planner,” where he jots down all the positive things he hopes to accomplish that day. “Associate with uplifting people,” he’ll write in a section titled “My Daily Priority List.” “Spend time with family.” “Let’s make this a day worth remembering!” 
 
 At 72, he simply refuses to think negative thoughts. He will not allow himself even to consider failure or uncertainty. When he picks up the Dallas Morning News at the breakfast table of his sprawling home in the North Dallas suburb of Plano, he does not dwell on any article that details human depravity, and he never looks at the celebrity gossip on page two. Instead he reads his favorite comic strips out loud to Sugar Baby and turns to the sports section. (Of course, he reads only about teams that win.) Then he searches for human interest stories about people who have done good things with their lives. He likes reading about the paralyzed high school football coach who could only move his mouth and blink his eyes but who coached his team to a state championship; the man born without arms who was named one of the Top Ten Outstanding Young Americans; the 37-year-old taxi driver with a fifth-grade education who decided to memorize the dictionary while waiting for customers and ended up owning the taxi company. 
 
 “Boy, oh, boy,” he says to Sugar Baby when he comes across such stories. “Isn’t it just amazing that we can go where we want to go, do what we want to do, and be who we want to be?” 
 
 When he sees a story that he likes, he clips it out with a pair of scissors. Then he takes it upstairs to his office, where he places it in one of his many files. He has an “Inspirational Story” file that holds articles about people who credit God for their success. He has a “Motivational Story” file for encouraging stories of a more secular nature. There is a file labeled “Humor,” one labeled “Quotes,” and another labeled “Success.” Sometimes he spends the entire morning in his office just leafing through magazines like Reader’s Digest or poring over biographies of people who did magnificent things with their lives. He reads that Thomas Edison’s teacher called him a dunce, that Albert Einstein flunked courses in math, that Walt Disney went broke seven times. Out come the scissors. He reads that 52 percent of all Fortune 500 CEOs grew up poor. Out come the scissors again. “Isn’t it amazing,” he likes to say to Sugar Baby when he comes back downstairs for lunch, “how we are designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the seeds of greatness?” 
 
 It is hard to believe that he really exists. When you meet him, you think he must be putting us all on. It has to be an act—the perfect unctuous movie role for someone like Bill Murray. Even his name seems to be straight out of a comedy writer’s imagination. Zig Ziglar! The stainless-steel-cookware salesman turned world-famous motivational speaker and best-selling author! A white-haired man with an ear-to-ear grin who walks through airports dispensing hugs and telling strangers, “Boy, oh, boy, this is a marvelous day!” A man who often answers the phone by singing, “Oh, good morning to you, good morning to you!” A devout Southern Baptist who doesn’t smoke or drink or utter a single profane word! 
 
 But for Zig Ziglar, being upbeat is serious business. After lunch he returns to his office and presses the record button on his tape recorder. It is time for him to dictate, to fashion the sentences that will help ordinary Americans overcome any obstacle put before them in their pursuit of health, wealth, and happiness. “With no hope, there is no action!” he says. His enunciation is so precise and Southern that he often adds an “uh” at the end of his sentences. “The story of life,” he says, “repeatedly assures you that if you will use what you have, you will be given more to use-uh.” 
 
 He speaks for several minutes, then turns off the tape recorder. He smiles. It is time to play golf—and this is the day that he is going to break 70. Every day that he goes to the golf course, he tells himself that he is going to break 70. It doesn’t matter that he has never broken 70 in his life. As he likes to say, “Yesterday ended last night. Today is a brand-new day.” 
 
 TO HIS YOUNGER COMPETITORS IN the world of motivational speaking and writing—handsome gurus like Tony Robbins, the designer-clad “Peak Performance Coach” who consults with the rich and famous and prowls the stage at his seminars with a high-tech microphone headset attached to his large head—Zig Ziglar must be a laughable anachronism, a creaky throwback to the simpler world of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale. These days media-savvy self-help stars seem to pop up with great fanfare every fifteen minutes. There are medical doctors who specialize in “inner peace” healing, charismatic CEOs who reveal the secret to making your first million, psychiatrists who help you to find renewed personal power in your dreams, therapists who put you in touch with your inner child, and personal trainers who teach you to lose weight and follow your bliss at the same time. According to one study, nearly two thousand self-help books arrive on shelves each year, and the publishing industry is always on the lookout for the next sensation: Call it “Chicken Soup for the Bookseller’s Soul.” 
 
 Ziglar, by comparison, is a dinosaur. His speeches consist of corny one-liners (“Happiness is not a when or a where, but a here and a now-uh!”), obvious advice (“When you associate with winners, your chance of winning goes up!”), banal sayings (“If you aren’t on fire, then your wood is wet”), and a seemingly endless series of real-life anecdotes about people who were once considered failures but turned themselves into successes. At least once during every speech he gets down on one knee like an old-time tent revivalist, points at the audience, and tells them the time has come to change their lives. (“You don’t have to be great to start,” he says, “but you have to start to be great-uh!”) Then, like a vaudevillian, he pulls out an ancient chrome water pump and begins to pump the handle up and down to illustrate that “in the game of life, before you get anything out, you must put something in!” 
 
 Even offstage and on the page, he’s filled to the gills with positivity. In his first book, See You at the Top, which was published 25 years ago this month, he exhorts readers to give themselves “a check up from the neck up,” to end “negative thinking, negative action, and negative reaction,” and to eliminate both their “stinkin’ thinkin’” and their “hardening of the attitudes.” “My friends,” he wrote, “whether you are in Decision Valley or on Hesitation Hill, let me urge you to fasten your seat belt, because you are on a trip to the top.” Although See You at the Top runs nearly four hundred pages, covering just about everything that could possibly be said about how to believe in yourself, Ziglar is so convinced people need more information about the subject that he has produced a three-hundred-page sequel called, appropriately enough, Over the Top, in which readers are told to—that’s right—believe in themselves! 
 
 Pages: 1 2 3 next » ||||| Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, who wrote more than 30 books and focused on positivity and leading a balanced life, died Wednesday in Texas. He was 86. 
 
 This undated photo provided by Ziglar, Inc., shows renowned motivational speaker Zig Ziglar. Ziglar, an author of more than 30 books known for a focus on living a balanced life, died Wedesday, Nov. 28,... (Associated Press) 
 
 This undated photo provided by Prestonwood shows renowned motivational speaker Zig Ziglar. Ziglar, an author of more than 30 books known for a focus on living a balanced life, died Wedesday, Nov. 28,... (Associated Press) 
 
 Ziglar, who had been suffering from pneumonia, died at a hospital in the Dallas suburb of Plano, said his personal assistant, Jay Hellwig. 
 
 With an aim at helping people achieve success in their careers and personal lives, in addition to a focus on Christianity, Ziglar was a prolific speaker who appeared at events alongside world leaders including several U.S. presidents and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. 
 
 "Mr. Ziglar was the same guy behind the closed doors as he was preparing for his presentations to thousands of people that he was when we were sitting at the kitchen table and he was reading the newspaper," Hellwig said. 
 
 Prestonwood Baptist Church Pastor Jack Graham, Ziglar's friend and pastor, said Ziglar "truly was filled with faith." 
 
 "He was positive. He was hopeful. You just never heard negativity from Zig Ziglar," Graham said. "It wasn't just something he did on a platform. This is who was. This is how he lived his life. And he helped so many people." 
 
 "He was a leader of leaders and a mentor of mentors and all that you can say," he added. 
 
 Ziglar started his fulltime career in motivational speaking when he was in his 40s. His first book was "See You at the Top." 
 
 "He got saved at the age of 42, which means that he accepted Jesus Christ as his savior," Hellwig said. "Ever since that day is what he said was the turning point of his life. The last 41 years of his life he lived fully with that as his mission." 
 
 "He also had the uncanny ability to make everyone he ran into feel like they were his friend," Hellwig said. 
 
 Ziglar was a World War II veteran who grew up in Yazoo City, Miss., and then went to work in sales for a series of companies, where his interest in motivational speaking grew, according to his Plano-based company's website. Hellwig said Ziglar moved to Dallas in the late 1960s. 
 
 Ziglar's company, which features more than a dozen speakers advocating the "Ziglar Way," offers motivation and performance training. 
 
 His book, "Confessions of a Grieving Christian," was written after the 1995 death of his oldest daughter, Suzan Ziglar Witmeyer, at the age of 46. 
 
 After a 2007 fall down a flight of stairs left him with a brain injury, Ziglar, along with another daughter, Julie Ziglar Norman, wrote "Embrace the Struggle," a book that described how his life changed after the injury. 
 
 In addition to his daughter, Ziglar is survived by his wife Jean, with whom he celebrated 66 years of marriage on Monday; his son, Tom Ziglar; and daughter Cindy Ziglar Oates. 
 
 A memorial service is set for Saturday at Prestonwood Baptist Church.
– The man Texas Monthly once dubbed "the nation's most motivated motivational speaker" is dead at age 86. Zig Ziglar, author of more than two dozen books, died in the Dallas suburb of Plano, reports AP. Ziglar rose to national fame with his first book, See You at the Top, and became a fixture on the lecture circuit and at corporate retreats for decades with his folksy advice. The Washington Post lists some of his mantras: “If you’re going to have to swallow a frog, you don’t want to have to look at that sucker too long!” “The more you gripe about your problems, the more problems you have to gripe about!” “You can get everything in life you want if you will just help other people get what they want!” A friend, former FedEx chief Fred Smith, is quoted in the Texas Monthly profile mentioned earlier: “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."