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Lowe was direct about religion, saying the way to change a life is to stand up straight and say, "Lord Jesus, I need you. I want you to be No. 1 in my life." Not everyone has been content with the heavily Christian content. At Success 1993 in Phoenix, Arizona, where 7,000 customers had come to hear speakers including Reagan, there were strong objections from the advertising staff of the state's Jewish News, who had come as a company-sponsored group. They took Lowe's standard offer to return their money if they were offended.
Even so, the Phoenix seminar was the one that really put the Success series, which had played 19 dates to smaller audiences in 1992, on the big-time motivational circuit. The key was persuading the former President to appear. After Reagan, Lowe said, it was easy to get Bush and Ford and the generals. Next he has targeted Margaret Thatcher, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Johnny Cash, who fit into his plans to move the Success seminars from auditoriums to stadiums next year, then from one day apiece to week-long crusades in the Billy Graham style and then from America to the world. (Lowe operates through a nonprofit corporation in Tampa, paying himself a salary of $128,000 a year.)
Former President Ford, who is 80 now, was next to last on the San Francisco program. Looking sturdy as ever, he gave about the same speech he gave on the road in 1976, still saying, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." The crowd was polite but obviously bored as Ford went on about the federal deficit. They had come for something else. This was not about Washington; it was about them, each of them. Some are practically addicts, trying one motivational session or program after another -- individuals desperate for more control over their own lives. Each one wants more money, more power, more love, more happiness, more esteem or self-esteem.
"There's a big need out there for something positive," said the woman sitting next to me, Gail Marshall, who turned out to be a newspaper editor looking for inspiration rather than a story. "I need it to get away from the cynicism in our business." More typical testimony came from Rita Landem, a real estate sales manager: "People are hungry for ways to improve. I go to one of these motivational seminars at least once a year. It's a way of pressing my reset button."
Right! It all seemed harmless enough. Ziglar's dynamic, commonsense advice really came down to . . . making lists! He tells people how to set goals and write them down every day. He did a riff on the way most of us make lists for the things we have to get done the last day of work before vacation. Do that every day, he said. "You were born to win. But to be a winner you must plan to win, expect to win."
Later, thinking about it outside in the rain, I knew most of us who were there were not going to win, and Ziglar knows that. So do the AT&T executives who sent their San Francisco people to Success 1994 on the same day the company announced that 15,000 jobs in its long-distance-services unit would be eliminated in the next two years. The No. 1 motivator planted an idea for losers too: It's your own fault; don't blame the system; don't blame the boss -- work harder and pray more.