The American motivational speaker and author Zig Ziglar, who died this week aged 86, was a legend in many parts of the US, yet practically unheard of in Britain. There's a smugly self-flattering way Brits might explain that: we're too hard-headed and unsentimental, this argument goes, to fritter millions on corny books with titles like See You at the Top, or Staying Up, Up, Up in a Down, Down World (to mention just a couple of Ziglar's more than 30 works). But that's surely only half-true. The bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic reflect, roughly equally, a longing for the perfectly happy life; there's nothing morally superior about seeking it from gurus with names like Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson.
Even in America, though, Ziglar and the brand of inspiration he represented had long since begun to seem like museum pieces. The self-styled "Master of Motivation" was a direct link to the world of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, authors who rose to prominence in the aftermath of the Great Depression with the hopeful thought that, given the right mindset, a happy and meaningful life might be possible despite the odds. It was an individualist message – one of Ziglar's proudest boasts was that he had appeared at events alongside Margaret Thatcher – but not a mean-spirited one. Nor, in contrast to far too many of his successors, was it delivered without humour. "People often say motivation doesn't last," Ziglar often said, in response to his critics. "But neither does bathing. That's why we recommend it daily."
It was also, crucially, a message that remained anchored in reality. The point of positive thinking, Ziglar insisted, was to provide motivation for doing hard work; nothing was possible without labour. The notion that merely having the right thoughts might be sufficient by itself would have struck him as absurd – yet these days that's exactly what many of the most popular self-help and popular business writers claim. This problem extends beyond publishing: consider the plight of conservative commentators and strategists during the recent campaign for the US presidency, many of whom behaved as if the key to a Mitt Romney landslide wasn't studying real-world polling, but just believing sufficiently hard in the goal.
Unbridled positive thinking fuelled by the self-help industry, the social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has argued, may also have helped bring about our current financial crises. A belief that success must be both guaranteed and easy is an excellent path, if you're an investment banker, to catastrophic failure. But Ziglar's claim was never that life could be effortless. His own included many lows, including, most bleakly, the death of his adult daughter in 1995.
This basic connection to life as it is really experienced was the reason, I suspect, that Ziglar got one of the warmest audience responses of all when I saw him talk, several years ago, at a motivational seminar in his home state of Texas. As a result of brain injuries sustained from a fall, he was barely coherent at times. But compared with the parade of get-rich-quick merchants and reality-denying optimists taking the stage that day (the latter category included the former president George W Bush), his message seemed resonant and substantive. The audience knew authenticity when they heard it.
Nonetheless, the Ziglar approach – the Ziglar Way, as it was inevitably retitled when packaged for consumption by corporate America – seems to be on its way out, and this may be just as well. A powerful body of psychological research testifies to the fact that the techniques of positive thinking are often counterproductive – that repeating upbeat affirmations, for example, can make people with low self-esteem feel worse, or that visualising the successful completion of a goal can sometimes make it less likely to be achieved. Meanwhile, the challenges we face, from economic to environmental crises, are surely too collective and complex to benefit much from a philosophy consisting solely of exhortations to individual hard work, generosity and cheer.
To stay Up, Up, Up in our own Down, Down World, we will need more than the power of positive thinking. Though Brits tempted to sneer at Ziglar's American bestsellers should remember that we'll need more than the power of positive baking, too.
