Zig Ziglar’s Wheel of Life (Updated 2024)

Chris LoCurto: Well folks on the show today, we’re talking with the phenomenal Tom Ziglar about how the choices you make, beginning today can help you achieve balanced success, significance, and a legacy… That is coming up next.

Chris LoCurto: Welcome to the Chris LoCurto show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Chris LoCurto: Welcome to the show folks. Question for you. Can you achieve massive change without massive upset? Yes.

It actually starts with focusing on building good habits in seven key areas, identifying life-killing bad habits that cause dissatisfaction and implementing positive habits.

Making one small choice at a time through a sequence of easy-to-follow steps helps build lives that are more productive, more fulfilling, and more meaningful.

These positive decisions impact our success, change our significance, and the legacy we leave for future generations.

Now this is phenomenal stuff that we’re diving into today and we’re doing it with a brilliant guest and that is Tom Ziglar. So welcome to the show, Tom. Tom, so good to have you on!

Tom Ziglar: Chris. It is awesome to be here and, wow. I couldn’t have paid you. I appreciate all those kind words.

Chris LoCurto: Well, I appreciate you being on the show, brother.

Chris LoCurto: Tom and I go back a long ways. I had the absolute pleasure of knowing Tom and the pleasure of knowing his dad Zig. I know a lot of our followers are big Zig fans.

Such a phenomenal legacy. Zig was such a great guy. Tom, you’ve always been a phenomenal guy and I just love the legacy that he’s left, that you’re leaving, that you guys are continuing on. So, so glad to have you on with us talking through all of this stuff.

Tom Ziglar: Awesome. Thank you.

Chris LoCurto: Well, for those of you, if you’ve been under a rock and you don’t know, Tom is the CEO of Ziglar, incorporated.

He shares not only the last name with his father’s executor, but he also carries on his philosophy, which is simply, you can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough people get what they want.

Chris LoCurto: That is something we live by here. I’ve operated from that for decades. Our focus here is to change lives and it’s always been correct. Since then, we have helped a bunch of people.

And the crazy thing is we get all the stuff that we want. So Tom joined the Zig Ziglar Corporation in 1987 learning every aspect of the business as he climbed from working in the warehouse, which is how dad does it, isn’t it, to sales, to seminars, promotions to sales management, and then onto leadership.

So he’s done a great job carrying the legacy. And again, as I’ve said, we’re honored to have him on the show. So Tom, quick question. We’re talking about your new book, Choose To Win, Transform Your Life One Simple Choice At A Time.

And this is just powerful. You guys have such a phenomenal wealth of information on having a great life on setting yourself up to have a great life. It just doesn’t stop all the books, the vault, everything that you guys got going on. So tell me why you chose to write this book.

Tom Ziglar: There’s always that. Well, hopefully, there is. Sometimes it’s not, but a lot of times there’s that lightning bolt that hits.

A few years ago I was in Melbourne, Australia and this guy in the crowd right before the break, I love Q&A that’s my favorite, you know Chris, we know, we know we’d rather help what people need help with.

So I always ask for questions and this guy says, so Tom, what’s the fastest way to success? And nobody had ever asked me that question before. It was always, you know, what are the keys to success or what do successful people do?

And so I had the momentary deer in the headlights look and I said the fastest way to success is to replace bad habits with good habits. And then we went to break and I didn’t think anything of it.

Steve Mcknight, my friend and mentor who had me there, he introduces the next segment and says, okay everybody, do you hear what Tom said?

Tom Ziglar: Get your pen out. Write this down. Tom Said, the fastest way to success is to replace bad habits with good habits. And I literally like I wrote it down because, because you know, somebody smart said that.

All day long I’m thinking about that quote because I love quotes. You know, dad was so famous for all his quotes, so I go Google it that night and nobody had said it.

Then I had about 30 plus hours of airplane time between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane and Papa New Guinea and LA and Dallas and I went into the seven areas of life that we’ve been teaching for 40 years.

We call it the Wheel of Life. And I said in each area of our life, if all we did was replace a bad habit with a good habit, and we did that often enough, what would happen?

And it was truth, right? It was such a simple idea. So that kind of became the bedrock, the cornerstone quote of the book and it just grew from there.

Chris LoCurto: Well, I’m glad to know that you were down in Melbourne, in Australia, shout out to our folks down there. For the first time we went down and did an event down there in Darwin this past year. And it’s just phenomenal people. We love t like crazy.

Tom Ziglar: Did you go to the beach in Darwin?

Chris LoCurto: Yes.

Tom Ziglar: Did you see all the signs like salt water, crocodile, man-eating sharks, and jelly fish that will kill you? I’m like, I’m not getting in.

Chris LoCurto: There is nothing in Australia that doesn’t kill you. We were literally on a tour and this guy parked underneath this huge pine tree.

Now I grew up in Tahoe, all pines, you know, big pine cones, all that stuff and he literally showed us one little piece and he goes the pine cones here.

If they fall and hit you on the head, they kill you. I’m like everything is deadly in Australia. It’s just crazy.

But yeah, we were walking along the beaches and all these signs and they’re not worried about, I’m like, so they’re like, as long as you stay far enough that it can’t get to you.

I’m like, but that’s like 10 feet, I’d rather be 30 but so again, just phenomenal people down there. So it was fantastic. We love them. Great folks.

What makes choose to win different than the rest of like leadership books or business books out there? What, what is the difference between this and what everybody else is saying?

Tom Ziglar: Well Dad said this, he said never give a promise without a plan. And one of the areas that our genre of motivation gets a bad rap in is people will say, just be motivated.

Just be happy. Now that you’ve heard that you can do it right and you’re like, wait, wait, what are the steps to go and do it?

And so in the book, you know, it’s kind of in thirds where the first, this is what I believe, and until you have a compelling why, a reason, a purpose, something that gets you excited in the morning, until that becomes a priority and you spend time uncovering that man, life is hard.

The obstacles are going to knock you down, you’re going to get setbacks. The business you started isn’t going to go right. The career path they’re on is going to get a detour or somebody who’s going to get, I mean, all those things happen.

Tom Ziglar: And so I said, okay, so what is the process? And so real simply, it’s identifying your purpose, you're why. And so we talk about that. And then there’s a great commercial in Dallas that they play every now and then.

It’s a law firm that represents child custody cases and they represent men. And this is what they say. They say that the attorney comes on and he says, you know, I’ve met too many men who made career their first focus.

And now that they have a lot of money, all that money won’t buy back their family or their health. And so the point is, is that you know, we can get gung ho and one area of life, but what’s the point, right?

And so this concept is, and I borrow one of Dad’s famous little funny quotes, I call it the termite philosophy. He said, you know, when it comes to damaging homes, hurricanes, and tornadoes get all the publicity but termites do so much more damage.

Tom Ziglar: And they take little bitty bites. And so the concept was, it’s not one radical change that changes my whole life. It is a little bitty termite-size bad habit that I replace with a little bitty termite-size good habit.

And then I go around the seven areas, which are mental, spiritual, physical, family, financial, personal, and career. And I start looking at each one of those and I start replacing the little bad habits with little good habits.

And then before we know it, we are a completely new human being. And so that’s kind of the idea is we got to start with, you know, my purpose, my why, what it is I want to accomplish.

And then the plan has got to be sustainable and doable. And the cool thing is, if you’re got a bad habit and replace it with a good habit, the results come a lot of cases instantaneously, but it builds. And so now every day you’re getting progress toward where you want to go.