Zig Ziglar: From Wear-Ever Cookware to Arenas and a Bankruptcy Lesson

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Hilary Hinton Ziglar was born prematurely in Coffee County, Alabama, in 1926, the 10th of 12 children. In 1931 the family moved to Yazoo City, Mississippi, and in 1932 his father, John Silas Ziglar, died of a stroke, followed two days later by Zig's younger sister. His mother, who had a fifth grade education, kept the family going through the Depression with short, rhyming maxims, a habit Ziglar later built a career on. After the Navy's V-12 program at the University of South Carolina, where he met Jean Abernathy, he left college in 1947 and struggled for two years selling Wear-Ever cookware door to door in Lancaster, South Carolina.

Reading early motivational books convinced him the bottleneck in sales was the seller's mindset, and by 1950 he was a divisional supervisor. In 1963 he co-founded American Salesmasters with three partners, sharing stages with Norman Vincent Peale and Maxwell Maltz and training for Mary Kay Cosmetics. In 1968 he moved to Dallas as a vice president of an automotive performance firm that went bankrupt in 1970. After a July 4, 1972 baptism he built his teaching around faith, launched what became Ziglar Inc. in 1977, wrote more than 30 books and gave about 50 arena talks a year by the late 1990s.

• The episode compares commission-only door-to-door selling to an audition where rejection is guaranteed about 90 percent of the time.
• Ziglar used the 1970 bankruptcy as a live case study in his seminars rather than hiding it.
• His son Tom Ziglar became CEO of the company in 1994.
• A 2007 fall down a flight of stairs left him with serious short-term memory problems.
• He kept speaking for three more years with his daughter on stage prompting him, retired in 2010 and died of pneumonia in Plano, Texas, in November 2012 at 86.