Zig Ziglar and Napoleon Hill and other similar sales
   professionals were really great at being inspirational. I think
   Zig Ziglar is probably the most "listenable".

   I went through a audiotape course (yeah, cassettes lol) with
   Tony Robbins, back in the mid 1990s and before him as a
   teenager, Norman Vincent Peale. [the Methodist Church I grew up
   in had his "Power of Positive Thinking" [yes, that's the guy] -
   all over the place).

   Anyway, the material is all in the same vein - and it's all
   fantastic stuff. you can't go wrong with any of these kinds of
   guys and Zig Ziglar is one of the best. For me, Norman Vincent
   Peale got me through some adolescent crap [along with Osho, who
   basically said, "everything you do is awesome just stop
   stressing out already" from a Indian perspective) and Tony
   Robbins with his version of NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) -
   got me through my 20s.

   I also had my brushes with Zig Ziglar, Napoleon Hill, One Minute
   Millionaire (I was practically a spokesperson for them in my
   area for a time, I was into it) - and they're all awesome.

   Any of these guys or a dozen others are really really great. If
   you found a guy that "speaks to you", you can't go wrong. Life's
   full of lots of shit and feeling like somebody's 'got your back'
   and gives you the attaboys that you need, make _full use_ of it
   'cause otherwise, life leaves you with that dog-eats-dog-you-die
   feeling which is a totally unnecessary attitude to walk around
   with each day when there's much better alternatives My favorite
   recent excursion into the business-speaker land is
   [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_L._Ackoff - Russ Ackoff
   brought Systems Thinking ahd Cybernetics out from the obscurity
   of academic in the 50s and brought it out military, government,
   businesses and universities, all the way to his death in 2009.

   The video quality of the stuff I found from him is cruddy, but
   it's along the same idea; "the way we do things is wrong. Think
   outside the box. Our categories are messed up. You can achieve
   anything with the right attitude, the right response, the right
   planning and not being overly rigid because you're STUCK, and
   I'm telling you a way out." No, that's not a quote from any of
   them. I've just absorbed the general 'feel" for speakers of this
   genre.

   All great stuff. Makes you feel like you take over the planet.
   Sort of what Malcolm Gladwell did with statistics or Pinker did
   with linguistics. They all have a way of tying things together,
   with varying degrees of accuracy, but in the end, leaving you
   with a feeling of accomplishment simply by listening to
   them/reading them/etc.
   I never could get into Nathaniel Branden. I *tried*. A good
   friend of mine was _really into_ his stuff in the late 90s. He
   made a mailing list and I helped him make it successful by
   promoting it on the slightly smaller Internet of that time.

   But while I liked my friend, I never _could_ get into Branden.
   He just didn't 'click' with me at all. In the end, I argued so
   much with him on the email list I helped him build (it was on
   eGroups... wow) that I ended up exiting stage left. My friend
   was a diehard fan and referred back to Branden like it was
   Gospel Truth and there were zero alternative perspectives.

   Convertitis. I suffer from it myself from time to time and work
   hard to avoid it. Hard though, when you find "The Answer" and
   use it as your singular lens for reality to look from without.


References

   Visible links
   1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_L._Ackoff