The best motivational speakers

Tony Robbins is the first person who comes to mind when most people think about a “motivational speaker.” But is he a motivational speaker?

He would say no. Tony describes himself as a “peak performance coach.”

Personally, I’d say: Sort of. Sure, he sometimes gives what we might call “motivational speeches.” But in reality, his career transcends any typical job description of a “motivational speaker.”

Think of it this way: Is Neil Degrasse Tyson a physicist? Is Sanjay Gupta a doctor? Is Martha Stewart an interior designer? Every profession has a leading figure who yes, is technically a practitioner of that thing, but whose career is much bigger and broader than the job title would normally suggest. Like, sure Neil Degrasse Tyson is a physicist. But he doesn’t do physics experiments in a lab like the way we normally mean when we say someone is a physicist or scientist. Tony Robbins is the same. Most motivational speakers get hired to speak at other people’s events in hotel ballrooms. Tony Robbins hosts his own events. In arenas. Or on his private island. Advertised on infomercials. See what I mean?

All this being said, he is easily the greatest on-stage, live-event motivator of our time. His skill, knowledge, and abilities as a speaker are unparalleled. I first saw him live at an Unleash the Power Within (his signature event) when I was sixteen. It was unforgettable, powerful, and indeed life changing. Go see to one of his events before he retires.

Les Brown was the original and in my opinion remains the very best life-story speaker on the planet. Whereas Zig Ziglar (below) gave speeches in which he used his personal story to illustrate the message he was trying to share, Les’s life story is the message. Les, in my opinion, invented the structure I mentioned earlier where a speaker tells a personal story, then applies it to the audience.

But with Les, it’s not just the words. It’s not just the message. And it’s not just the story. It’s him. It’s his vibe. It’s the way he says the words. The way he moves. You could watch his speech without understanding English and still feel motivated afterward. You could watch it without the sound on and you’d still absorb some of his energy.

He has an infectious laugh which he deploys at will in response to his own jokes, quotes liberally from a wide range of literature, and paces the stage with an evangelist’s zeal. His story is indeed inspiring. But it’s the way he tells it, and the way it makes you feel, that makes him the best life-story motivational speaker of all time.

Before we get to Zig Ziglar, allow me to nerd out with a quick history lesson: The seed of what would eventually become our modern notion of motivational speaking was planted a century ago when the wealthy industrialist Andrew Carnegie challenged a young man named Napoleon Hill to write a book about the “secret knowledge” that had turned Carnegie and the other figures of the industrial revolution into millionaires (or robber barons, depending on who you ask). Napoleon Hill accepted the challenge and wrote Think and Grow Rich, which established motivational speaking tropes like “whatever a mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve;” “every negative event” contains the “seed” of benefit; the path to riches starts with a “burning desire for wealth.”

A couple of decades later, a guy named Norman Vincent Peale came along and wrote a book whose title remains in the cultural vernacular to this day: The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale was a pastor by trade and thus the first person to present these motivational ideas live, on stage, in something like what we’d now call a “motivational speech.”

But the first guy to put all this together and essentially invent the concept of a “motivational speaker” as I’ve defined it in this article was Zig Ziglar. Zig’s speeches combined the self-help of Napoleon Hill and the positive attitude psychology of Norman Vincent Peale with his own personal story: A pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps narrative of growing up in poverty to become a highly successful door-to-door cookware salesperson.

As a speaker, Zig pioneered the business model of traveling from conference to conference presenting enthusiastic, interactive, and emotionally rousing speeches about having a positive attitude, working hard, and, of course, getting rich. He polished and perfected his speeches early in his career. Most of the material he was presenting in his thirties remained word-for-word identical—but also effective in inspiring audiences—for the rest of his life. If you watch Zig’s speeches today, some of his lines can feel cliché or even corny. But remember, they weren’t cliché at the time. He was the first one to say them. He invented the clichés. He was the original motivational speaker.