Larry Winget

Larry Winget is an American business speaker, television personality, and bestselling author of personal development and small business books, widely known by his trademark nickname the Pitbull of Personal Development. His style is bluntly direct, anti-self-help, and built on personal accountability, and his books have sold in the millions across multiple bestsellers.

His best-known titles include Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life (Wiley, 2004), the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller You're Broke Because You Want to Be, It's Called Work for a Reason, People Are Idiots and I Can Prove It, Your Kids Are Your Own Fault, Grow a Pair, and What's Wrong with Damn Near Everything. The books address money, work ethic, parenting, marriage, and personal responsibility from the same unsparing perspective: that outcomes follow choices and that wanting better results requires changing the underlying behavior rather than the surrounding circumstances.

He is a member of the National Speakers Association's Hall of Fame as a CPAE (Council of Peers Award for Excellence) inductee and one of fewer than one hundred fifty speakers worldwide to hold the designation. He hosted the A&E television series Big Spender, in which he intervened in the finances of families spending themselves into ruin, and has been a frequent guest on national television and radio.

Before his speaking and writing career he was a senior executive at a Fortune 500 telecommunications company in Oklahoma, lost everything in a business failure, and rebuilt from the experience. His personal story of bankruptcy and rebuilding has become part of his platform: the books are not theoretical advice but field reports from the other side of failure.