(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. "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. 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. Rising by one’s bootstraps through the “power of positive thinking” has long been a compelling narrative in American lore. 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. Then he searches for human interest stories about people who have done good things with their lives. “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? “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. “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. 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. He settled in the Dallas area by the late 1960s, initially for a job training workers at a direct-sales company. 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! 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. Every day that he goes to the golf course, he tells himself that he is going to break 70. “Yesterday ended last night,” he liked to tell himself. 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. (“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.
– 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."