You Can Have Everything - Words from Zig Ziglar

May 01, 2019

You can have everything. That's a promise. Money, success, family, happiness. Whatever you want. You can have it all.

Don't listen to the nay-sayers. They don't know what they're talking about. Listen to the yea-sayers, because they know.

This promise, that I can have everything, was made to me and a table of my friends and colleagues at a breakfast I attended in 2008. The person who made the promise was a wonderful man with an unforgettable name, Zig Ziglar.

But he didn't exactly phrase it in the form of a promise. More like an equation, or a formula. Here's the way he said it: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

If you know Floyd, then you know how much Zig meant to him. They had a very special mentor-protégé relationship that lasted over 38 years, from the time Floyd was a fledgling speaker looking up to his hero Zig, until Zig's passing, not long after our breakfast meeting.

Floyd had arranged for all of the Master Trainers at The Floyd Wickman Team to travel to Dallas and meet with Zig. He wanted to show Zig the organization he had built on some of the principles and lessons he learned from him.

Despite looking very frail, Zig was energetic and full of engaging conversation. But a few minutes into the meal it became obvious that something was missing. Zig was repeating himself.

He looked at Floyd as if he had just remembered something important and said, "Now remember, Floyd, you can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want."

Just a few minutes later, Zig looked up and said, "Now don't forget this, Floyd, you can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want."

I wasn't keeping score, but he repeated himself no less than twenty times over a three-hour breakfast.

It was hard to accept that one of Floyd's heroes was disappearing right before our eyes. I went through the gamut of emotions, from confusion to embarrassment to sadness and finally to a profound lesson to be learned.

This promise was the essence of Zig. He had repeated it so often that it became the one thing he couldn't forget.

For all of us that day, it became a lesson in the importance of not only what you remember, but also what you are remembered for.

The Floyd Wickman Team blog by Mike Pallin

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