Leadership Thought: The Two Most Influential Friends I Never Met.

Dear Friends

Two of the most influential “friends” I have never met are Zig Ziglar and John Maxwell. While never personally meeting either of them, I have a deep personal affection for and a relationship with each of them because of their writing and speaking.

Zig wrote the million selling  See You at the Top, the first book that I ever remember reading that I read again and again. It was the book that influenced my style of teaching, for Zig was a story teller, and I love sharing stories when I teach.

My love for John Maxwell came a few years later. I started listening to his cassette tapes on leadership, many of which I still have hidden away in some boxes in our basement. I would look for them, but tape recorders are hard to find these days.

John is considered the world’s foremost speaker on leadership, having written well over 100 books, many of which I have devoured.

But until yesterday I didn’t know that it was Zig Ziglar who had a profound impact and influence on John Maxwell.

Yesterday on “Minute with Maxwell,” a daily two minute leadership podcast by John which I try to listen to every day, he shared a story about Zig.

As a young man, he heard Zig was speaking, and he not only wanted to  hear him but he wanted to sit in the front row to listen to this illustrious Christian businessman share his message.

And so John arrived three hours early so he could get a ticket in the front row. One of the 1,200 people in the Dayton Convention Center, and sitting in the front row, he heard Zig share a message that forever changed his life.

The words John heard that would change his life were these: “If you will help other people get what they want in life, they’ll help you get  everything you want in your life.”

John said the words changed his life because up until that time he was the kind of leader who was intent on getting others to capture his vision, join his team, read his books, and build his legacy.

John’s life forever changed that day. He learned that the secret of influencing others was simply serving others. As a result, no longer was his leadership style self- directed but now it became other directed. “How can I help you.” and not “how can you help me,” became a philosophy that would turn his life and his style of leadership around.

It is so true. If you are intent on first adding value to others, you will get all kinds of value added to you in return.

Jesus was an “add value kind of leader.” Always other centered, he prayed and planned and prepared and pursued others with one purpose: to add value to them and that message has changed millions of lives both now and for all eternity.

John says Zig not only relentlessly shared this same message again and again, but that he lived it; he modeled the message, and in doing so he became one of the best-known inspirational speakers of all time.

Adding value to others, adds value to ourselves, and after all wasn’t that what Jesus taught when He said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Yours in faith and friendship,

Tom