As I look back over my career, I see that just about everything I taught really can be categorized as planning, preparing, or expecting to win. Because of that, I have organized this book into three sections that track the best stories, ideas, and principles that relate to those skills. When you finish reading Born to Win, you will have the absolutely very best of the core principles and skills I have shared with people for the past forty-plus years. Let me give you a quick preview of what you will learn in Born to Win.
PART I: PLANNING TO WIN
There are lots of parts and sub-parts you have to put together when you begin to plan your success, but a few things are foundational. Planning has to be based on getting a clear vision of what you want, because without a vision you don’t know which goals to set. Without goals you have no targets, and without targets you have nothing to measure how you’re doing. So you can see how important a vision is. Getting a clear vision for your future is also important because it plays a huge role in the creation of desire! Did you know that desire is the mother of motivation? Desire is the “want to” and the motor that fuels and powers sustained success.
Desire is important and vision is critical, but there are some personal qualities you must have or acquire to get the best possible results. As a matter of fact, there are six qualities: honesty, character, faith, integrity, love, and loyalty. I have called these qualities the foundation stones in the stairway to the top. You are going to learn how these qualities are critical and how to implement them as you plan to win.
PART II: PREPARING TO WIN
At first glance, you might think planning and preparing mean the same thing. I admit they might look like they are first cousins, but I see preparation as much different from planning. Preparation is a matter of equipping yourself to win with the right tools, knowledge, and support it will take to turn your dreams into plans that will make your vision into reality. So, this section of Born to Win will be about how to equip yourself in the best possible way to ensure your planning efforts will be successful.
Equipping and preparing yourself to win requires five things:
You need the right knowledge to win
You must continually raise your personal performance bar
You must acquire tools that help you work better and faster
You have to practice your skills
You have to surround yourself with positive influences and people
In summary, you have to train yourself to become a twenty-four-hour champion. Winning involves planning and preparing. Both are a constant-improvement, never-ending process. When you stop planning and preparing… you stop winning. Twenty-fourhour champions continually equip themselves to win!
PART III: EXPECTING TO WIN
I’ve always said that when you have planned and prepared to win, you then have the right to expect to win. This section of Born to Win is going to show you the power of expectation and what drives it! The ultimate fruit of positive expectation is hope, and it is hope that pulls you forward in all you attempt to do. I’m always hopeful and I never worry. I can say that because I expect the best possible result in all that I do. I expect the best because I planned my success, prepared myself to execute my plans, and earned the right to expect the best.
Desire is the mother of motivation because that is where your motivation is born. Properly planning and preparing heightens your expectations, which fuels your desire and drives you to become even more motivated. Through the years I’ve continually heard from individuals from all walks of life whose lives were in a downward spiral—until they heard something in my audio products or read something in my books that gave them the will and the skills they needed to change their circumstances and transform their lives. They testify that by putting my simple suggestions into practice their lives were transformed. Sometimes the transformation was mental, sometimes it was spiritual, and other times it was material. Whatever the transformation, there was a commonality to the core changes they made. These people changed the way they viewed themselves. They became willing to make significant changes, and they came to believe they were born to win! What they really did is develop the skills and take the necessary actions they needed to plan, prepare, and expect to win!
My son Tom and I are co-authors of this book. Together we chose the most effective information I have taught in twenty-nine books over the past forty years. After you’ve read this book and Tom’s contributions, I believe you will see why I have faith that the Ziglar legacy, along with our pure and simple philosophy, is in good hands for the generations to come. I’m not the kind of guy who says anything is over until it’s over, but because of my age, it’s possible that this book may be my last. This is why I have dotted every “i” and crossed every “t” in this book to make sure it contains the very best of the best of all I’ve learned and taught in my career. I do believe you were born to win. But I also know that to be the winner you were born to be, you have to plan to win and prepare to win before you can expect to win. There are a lot of things that have to happen before you can change the world!
—Zig Ziglar
PLANNING TO WIN
1
I’VE ALWAYS SAID that man was designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, and endowed with the seeds of greatness. I believe that almost as much as I believe in God. What I mean when I make that statement is that man has the opportunity to achieve greatness and is hard-wired to make it happen. Every person has unique gifts, and those gifts give him or her the power and the opportunity to accomplish great things, if he or she learns how to use those gifts and channel them in the right direction. Now you might say, “Zig, if that’s true, why doesn’t everyone achieve greatness?” Actually, that answer is easy. Everybody doesn’t want to be great, and many people who want to be great aren’t willing to do the work to make it possible!
The great coach of the Green Bay Packers, Vince Lombardi, wisely stated, “Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.” The simple truth is that you have to want to do something badly enough before you have the slightest chance of doing it! If you don’t want it badly enough, I absolutely guarantee that you will not be willing to do the planning and preparing it takes to get it.
Psychologists will tell you in a New York minute (which, for your information, is thirty-two seconds), that you invariably and inevitably move toward the strongest impression in your mind. The impressions that are most vivid in your mind are the things you want to do. That’s why desire is so powerful and plays a big role in planning. If you really want to do something, it means that it’s something you are going to think about most of the time. When you constantly think about something, you talk about it all the time and you get lots of new ideas about how to make it happen. When you have lots of ideas about something, it makes planning
