Embrace the Struggle

Embrace the Struggle: Living Life on Life's Terms

By Zig Ziglar with Julie Ziglar Norman (2009)

Opening hook

It was after 10 p.m. on March 7, 2007, when Zig Ziglar got out of bed in his Plano, Texas home to write down an idea. He had walked the path between his bedroom and his office across the upstairs hall thousands of times across twenty-two years in that house. He never turned on a light. He did not want to wake his wife Jean, the woman he calls the Redhead. That night, his left foot came down where the floor ended and the staircase began.

He fell sixteen marble steps. He hit his head on the floor at the bottom, then slammed it into the front door. He was unconscious for several minutes. His wife dialed 911. The paramedics came. The hospital found two brain bleeds. He had no broken bones, but he had vertigo and a brain injury that left his short-term memory, in his words, very, very short.

Ziglar was eighty years old. He had spent more than fifty years on stages telling audiences that attitude beats circumstance, that you can have everything in life you want if you help enough other people get what they want, that getting knocked down is a given but getting up is a choice. He had built a career on motion. He paced. He ran across stages. He dropped to one knee at the edge to make a point. After the fall, his children watched him for a season and concluded that the old format was finished. He could no longer hold a thread for thirty minutes. He could speak for ten seconds and not recall what he had just said.

The realization moment did not come at the bottom of the stairs. It came weeks later, when his son Tom and his friends Peter and Tamara Lowe sat down to figure out what to do with a Get Motivated Seminar booked in Houston six days after the accident. They could cancel the contracts. They could retire the brand quietly. Or they could put Ziglar on stage in a chair, with someone else asking him questions, and let the audience see exactly what had happened. They chose the third option. Two years later, Ziglar wrote that the message coming out of his mouth in that interview format reached people his old performance never could.