Years ago, I went to a Fayetteville bookstore looking for a book I’d heard about to help people through their organizational challenges.
I once considered myself an organized guy, but that was back before family life with its basketball games, Cub Scout meetings, health care fl exible spending accounts and reimbursement forms, church leadership and other demands added volumes to what needed to be organized. Now the stacks of papers on my desk at home drive my wife crazy.
I discovered the book I sought was in a section labeled “self-help.” As I flipped through its pages to decide whether to make the purchase, I nervously glanced around to see who might spot me.
I felt a little like a teenage boy lingering near the rack displaying the great Cosmopolitan magazine cover. I wanted to see what was offered but didn’t want anyone to know I was looking.
Looking in the self-help section seemed anything but relying on myself. I was seeking help from massmarketed authors to deal with something I viewed as a weakness in my life.
Who wants to acknowledge weakness?
Who wants to share thatwith other lingerers at the book store, particularly if someone I knew walked by?
Growing older helps one to realize nobody’s perfect.
Everyone suffers a little self-doubt in their lives, or at least they should. I’m sure there are some narcissists who believe they’re perfection made manifest, but let’s leave the subject of college football coaches and politicians for another day.
Eventually, I fi gured out a little help to refi ne one’s strengths and reduce the impact of one’s weaknesses is a critically important and ongoing process in the lives of mere mortals.
Where’s it going to come from if you don’t seek it out? Certainly not television, unless you’re watching “Moonshiners” and other so-called reality shows just to confirm there are other people worse off. Then you can’t even take comfort in that, because those people are making money by being worse off. Then you start to realize some - certainly not all - of those peoplehave to change and grow.
And I emphasize the word grow,” Zigler told the magazine. “If you keep learning new things, the new information - so many times - strengthens what you already know. When you’ve got that strength and conviction because of what you’re learning and doing, you have a better chance for success in all areas of life.”
Today, I know it was silly to be concerned about looking for answers in the “self-help” section. Anyone who might sneer at the idea of self-improvement probably wasn’t even shopping in the book store that day.
In “The Shawshank Redemption,” which is probably showing right now on TBS, imprisoned Andy DuFresne refuses to accept the stifl ing, hopeless environment of prison life.
His friend, Red, urges him to give up wasting time focused on such frustrating, out-of-reach hopes.
Andy rejects his plea.
“I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really: Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
Zigler got busy living and encouraged the rest of us to make the most of our short time on this earth. That’s the kind of help we all should be willing to embrace.
GREG HARTON IS OPINION PAGE EDITOR OF NWA MEDIA.
have it pretty good, not because of the money, but because they’re content with their lives and just let the voyeurs/viewers peek in because someone’s goofy enough to pay them for it.
Zig Zigler died last week.
He earned a world-class reputation as a motivational speaker and author after turning that into his profession in his 40s.
Raised in rural Yazoo City, Miss., Ziglar worked in sales and did well, but traced a key moment to his cookware sales supervisor’s encouragement and advice on how to succeed as a salesman.
“Mr. (P.C.) Merrell changed the way I saw myself - a little guy with an inferiority complex from a small Mississippi town,” Ziglar wrote. “The change was dramatic.”
Amazingly, Zigler was 44 when he left his sales job and took on motivational speaking full time. He was 49 when a small publishing company agreed to publish his first book after it had been rejected by dozens of others.
He encouraged others to believe in themselves and to always learn. His daily read was newspapers and the Bible. “That way I know what both sides are up to,” he told Success magazine.
“You need to be a constant student because things change and you
Opinion, Pages 5 on 12/03/2012