Let's Get Motivated

By RICHARD REEVES

The band was called Allegiance, and it was playing a number with a chirpy message of personal renewal:

This is for all the lonely people, thinking that life has passed them by.

Don't give up until you drink from the silver cup

and ride that highway in the sky.

At 7 o'clock on a rainy morning in San Francisco, hundreds of people were running across the parking lots of the Cow Palace in the pursuit of happiness. This was the fourth of 41 stops scheduled so far for Success 1994, a road show featuring the best-known former cookware and computer salesmen in the country, famous athletes, more famous preachers, military heroes, the Governor of New York and three -- count 'em, three! -- former Presidents of the U.S.

Where are they now? Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Gerald Ford, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, Tom Landry, Bart Starr, Roger Staubach, Mike Ditka, Marilyn Quayle and Ruth ((Mrs. Norman Vincent)) Peale? On the success road along with Mario Cuomo, Larry King, Willard Scott, Paul Harvey, the Rev. Robert Schuller and Zig Ziglar. The show grew in marquee power when it moved on to Dallas last month with six starters on the motivational dream team -- Bush, Schwarzkopf, Staubach, Schuller, Peale and Ziglar -- talking to 16,500 people who had paid from $49 to $225 to be in Reunion Arena for eight hours of all-American self-improvement. "No matter what your line of work, President of the United States or running a business," Bush told them, "character does matter." Schwarzkopf added that it was "a thing called 'character' that described General George Patton and Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa and Margaret Thatcher."

Success 1994 is part revival meeting, The Music Man and medicine show and all uplift, with dialogue inspired by the Bible, Poor Richard's Almanac, Calvinism, common sense and Horatio Alger. The show has already been to Seattle, San Jose, Washington, San Francisco, Anaheim, San Diego, Phoenix, Houston and Columbia. Coming up: Cleveland, Youngstown, Akron, Richmond, Sarasota, Rochester, Chicago . . .

At the San Francisco seminar, which drew 6,000 customers, I paid $110 extra (regular price: $49) for what I was assured would be an "awesome!" seat up front in the arena and a 7 a.m. breakfast with Zig Ziglar, a former pots- and-pans salesman billed as "America's No. 1 Motivational Speaker." Over doughnuts and coffee with 300 other "VIPs," I nodded and laughed along with everyone else at stories of his hardscrabble boyhood in Yazoo City, Mississippi, where his mother said motivational things like this: "You're going to have to lick that calf over again. That job might be all right for some boys. But you're not most boys. You can do better."

The definition of success, said Ziglar, 68, is "getting many of the things money can buy -- and all the things money can't buy. Money can buy you a mattress, but you can't buy a good night's sleep." I had come thinking Success 1994 would be about dollar signs -- and Ziglar recycled the old line, "Anyone who says he's not interested in money will lie about other things" -- but I was wrong. Success 1994 is essentially a secular religion preached by believing Christians. The recurrent theme: Money has no value without happiness and love.

In the main hall in San Francisco, the crowd was thick with employees from AT&T. Corporations buy about 40% of Success's tickets, mostly to reward good work or to perk up salesmen and saleswomen suffering from syndromes called "fear of closing" and "cold-call reluctance."

The first speaker was Dave Dravecky, the San Francisco Giants pitcher who came back from cancer surgery on his throwing arm to win a game before the arm broke like a twig in his second comeback start. A videotape of that last game had most of the crowd crying, then cheering the big and earnest one-armed man onstage. "When You Can't Come Back" was his title, and he talked about God and Jesus, telling some awkward jokes with punch lines like, "She is the wind beneath my wing . . . singular, not plural, get it?" Another video introduced Mary Lou Retton, reminding the crowd of the spunky kid from West Virginia who in 1984 became, against all odds, the first American woman to win an individual Olympic gold medal in gymnastics. "For me," she said, "the word team stands for Together Everyone Achieves More."

"I am in the life-changing business," said Ziglar as he came on. "Failure is an event -- it is not a person," he said. He attacked "mental B.O." and "stinking thinking" and "people who think denial is a river in Egypt." Of freedom, he said, "Take the train off the tracks and it's free -- but it can't go anywhere." He dazzled them with statistics: 72% of the students in Who's Who Among American High School Students are virgins; immigrants have four times as much chance to become millionaires as native-born Americans. "Listen to this," he said; "67% of all golf strokes are made within 60 yds. of the hole, but if you go out and watch golfers practice, I guarantee you they will spend 80% of their time concentrating on shots longer than 60 yds. The least effective people spend their time on actions that are not productive but which they are most comfortable doing."

Ziglar has been doing this and writing best-selling books with titles like See You at the Top for more than 30 years. He gets paid $30,000 up front for each appearance on the Success circuit, quite a bit less than half of what Reagan and Schwarzkopf collect. But he commanded the Cow Palace for 2 1/2 hours with only a 15-min. break to sell his tapes, both audio and video. How to Stay Motivated was $169.95, Courtship After Marriage was $60. "The whole shootin' match, value $2,515," could be had for $995.

Ziglar was followed by the Success tour's organizer, Peter Lowe, 35, the son of Canadian missionaries. Lowe, small and red-haired, looked like the teenager Ron Howard once played on Happy Days as he gave an hour and 15 minutes of tips on "Success Skills." No Zig Ziglar, he comes across as a mechanical model of the older man, finally zeroing in on fear -- a word he defined as "False Evidence Appearing Real" -- as the reason for business failure.

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.

"It's not money or power," Peter Lowe said when we talked after the Cow Palace was empty and still again, rejecting whatever cynicism I had brought to the seminar. "People want love, happiness and peace . . . What we're doing is not 'Get rich quick.' It's moral and spiritual; this lays a foundation for a new life."

He's probably right. What bothered me was that so many people there wanted a new life, any new life. But that's what America has always been about, isn't it?