Developing the Qualities of Success. Zig Ziglar

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       You are at the top when you know that he who would be the greatest among you must become the servant of all.

       You are at the top when you recognize, confess, develop and use your God-given physical, mental and spiritual abilities to the glory of God and for the benefit of mankind.

       You are at the top when you stand in front of the Creator of the Universe and He says to you, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

      After I identified the top, I realized what I’d really done. I’d identified the bottom. That’s the base; that’s the foundation upon which you can build any kind of career, whether it’s in education, athletics, business, medicine, law, accounting, computers, or whatever. I believe these are principles that will make a difference.

      What happens to people when they have no hope? I have a good friend, her name is Pam Lontos. Pam was an overweight, depressed housewife. She had been under the care of a psychiatrist for five years, who assured her every time they got together that she would always need him because, You are never going to get any better. I am your only hope. Bottom line is she slept from twelve to eighteen hours every day. She only got up to prepare breakfast for her children and husband, and then she went back to bed. She got up again to prepare their dinner and she went back to bed. That was her daily routine and this had been going on for several years.

      And then one day she heard an advertisement on the radio, and the advertisement was about a health club and it kind of piqued her interest. For the first time in a long time, she caught a glimmer of hope. As a story within a story, General Robinson Risner is a friend of mine. He was a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton for about seven years—five and a half years he was in solitary confinement in a minute cell. The way he kept from losing his mind was that he would jog by the hour right there in place in his cell. And it still, on occasion, was so depressing in there, he would take his underwear and shove it in his mouth and scream at the top of his voice. He did not want the enemy to know they were getting to him. And he said one day, in the depth of his despair, he was down on the floor in this little cinder block cell and he started crawling around and putting his eye up against the wall, hoping he could see something on the outside. There was a minute crack and he saw a single leaf. And in one of our classes, our Born to Win Seminar, he said, “You will never know what it meant to me to see a single green leaf after having seen no sign of life other than my tormentors all of these years.”

      I don’t know how the story impacts you, but that day I made a new resolution. And that was I’d be very careful about what I complained about and very sensitive to the things that I have to be grateful for.

      Pam Lontos that day, listening to the radio, caught somewhere just a glimpse, a glimmer of hope in what the commercial said. She decided to get up and go down to that club and she watched the people there and everybody was smiling, everybody was busy, everybody seemed to be in a good mood and having fun. She decided to join. Well, you see, that’s step number one, and that’s so important. We’ve all got to have that first step. My friend Joe Sabah says, “You don’t have to be great to start, but you’ve got to start to be great.” And so Pam saw that; she’d taken that first step. She joined the club. And when she started exercising, she started feeling so much better. As a matter of fact, she got a job selling the enrollments in that club and was very successful at it, but she was very spasmodic. She was up and down, she was on the rollercoaster, because you don’t cure depression like that, just by a few exercises and a few weeks, and so her manager gave her a set of my tapes which contained the information I’ll be sharing with you. She started listening to those tapes and that was the encouragement she needed to fuel the hope. She stabilized her productivity, which consistently got better and better, and then she decided she wanted to sell radio advertising because she really loved radio.

      She applied to her favorite station. They weren’t even interviewing anybody, wouldn’t even talk to her. So all she did, because she had that hope (and if you’ve got hope you’ll take action), she just showed up at eight o’clock when the manager got there, sat just outside of his office, from eight o’clock until five o’clock when he left. She did it one day, two days, three days, four days, and on the fourth day the manager said, “You know, I believe this girl wants a job.” He interviewed her and she sold him. She got the job and almost immediately she became number one in production, the number one salesperson there. As a matter of fact, a few months later she was out-producing the other four salespeople combined! And then she got a big break—she broke her leg. And it was a serious break. She was in a cast from her hip to her ankle. The doctor said it was going to be “ten months before you’ll be able to go back to work.” So ten days later she showed back up at the radio station on crutches, hobbling around, hired a driver to drive her around, but it was so difficult getting in and out of the car, she knew she had to do something else. But she was being fed with hope! She saw what she was able to do. She saw the changes that came to the inevitable question: What can I do now? People with hope get to be pretty creative, you see. What can I do now that will enable me to retain my productivity?