Adopting an Owner's Mentality in Your Own Life

At some point in your life, you have to realize something uncomfortable: Nobody is coming to save you.

Not your boss. Not your spouse. Not your circumstances changing on their own. If you're going to get out of the garbage pit of life, you're going to have to climb out yourself. The good news? You actually can.

What This Episode Explores

George and Liz dig into what it means to adopt an owner's mentality in your personal life. Not the corporate buzzword version designed to turn employees into drones. The real version. The one that unlocks everything else.

The Lessons That Matter

The Moment Everything Changed

George tells a story he doesn't share often.

He was at a party. Sitting on a couch. Watching a half-broken TV where everything looked shorter than it should because the screen didn't work right. He'd been drinking. He'd smoked some weed. He'd popped a pill he probably shouldn't have.

"I remember hearing myself say, 'Oh, man. This place could burn down, and I'd just watch the flames,'" George recalls.

He woke up the next morning with a single thought: What the crap are you doing with your life? Who have you become?

"I doubt it was actually me speaking to myself," George says. "It was probably my spirit speaking to me. Like, dude, this is not what you're made for. This is not why you're on the planet."

That was the moment he realized nobody was coming to save him. He had to save himself.

There's a Buddha quote George loves: "No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path."

For you: What would it take for you to have your own wake-up moment? And if you've already had it, what are you doing about it?

Treat It Like It's Yours

George traces his ownership mentality back to a childhood memory.

His family moved a lot when he was younger. They rented houses. One day, a landlord came to inspect a place they were moving out of. The man looked around and said, "This place looks better than when you moved in."

George's dad said four words that stuck: "Treat it like it's yours."

"He was talking about a house, a building," George says. "But he wasn't. You could tell fundamentally he was talking about more than just a house."

George still rents. And people at his neighborhood social committee were once going on about how renters don't take care of their houses. George spoke up: "Do any of you know that we rent our house?" Pure shock. Nobody realized he wasn't a homeowner.

The same thing happened professionally. People assumed George was the owner of The Sales Lion. People assumed he was the owner of Impact Creative. He wasn't. But he was treated like one because he acted like one.

"When you treat it like it's yours, you treat it different," George says.

For you: What in your life are you treating like a rental when you should be treating it like you own it?

The Power of Stewardship

George breaks down the difference between owning, borrowing, and renting. But he says there's one word that matters more than all three: stewardship.

"It doesn't matter if you rent it, if you're borrowing it, or if you're owning it," he explains. "If you have a mindset of stewardship, the job of supervising or taking care of something such as an organization or property. I'll even add in people."

When you don't have a stewardship mindset, you leave things in a worse place than you found them. When you do, you're always trying to get things to the next best place.

"We are to be stewards of ourselves, stewards of those around us, stewards of the things that we own," George says. "There should be this mental thing as an owner. I'm always trying to get it to the next best place."

For you: Are you stewarding your own life? Or are you letting it deteriorate while you wait for someone else to fix it?

You Are Where You Are Because of You

Liz makes a point that lands hard.

"The faster you are completely honest with yourself about why you are where you are, the quicker you will be able to actually solve the problem," she says. "Because the more you deflect and displace blame and ownership for why you are where you are, the longer it will take you to get where you wanna go because you will forever be solving the wrong problem."

George puts it more directly: "You are where you are because of one thing. You. That's it. When you can embrace that mentality, now you can start to fix stuff."

It's hard to fix others. Impossible, actually. And if you're blaming others, it'll never get fixed. But if you realize you are where you are because of you, that's one of the first great steps toward getting somewhere else.

For you: What are you still blaming on other people that's actually yours to own?

The Words That Build Ownership

George lays out a framework of words that form the web around ownership mentality:

Borrowed time. Every single one of us, the minute we are born, is on borrowed time. 75 to 80 summers. 75 to 80 winters. That's all we get. When you realize you're on borrowed time, your problems get smaller and easier to climb through because they're just a fraction of a moment.

Accountability. Stop playing the blame game. Oh, it's our government. Oh, it's our boss. Oh my gosh, I could do so much better if my wife, my husband, my kids. Take accountability for yourself, for your actions.

Responsibility. A lot of things in life weren't your fault. But you still have to take responsibility for the fact that they happened, that's where you were, that's part of your story. And you have to move forward from there.

Proactivity. Quit sitting around and waiting. Go out and take it. Take the day. Seize the day. Nobody's coming to do your work.

Respect and upkeep. Are you focused on upkeep when it comes to the valuable relationships in your life? Are you paying attention to upkeep when it comes to keeping your own engine running? Do you respect yourself and those around you enough to upkeep the things that need to be kept up?

For you: Which of these words is the weakest link in your chain right now?

Quotable Moments

"Nobody is coming to save you. Nobody."

"When you treat it like it's yours, you treat it different."

"You are where you are because of one thing. You. That's it. When you can embrace that mentality, now you can start to fix stuff."

Your Next Move

George offers a way to measure whether you're actually living with an owner's mentality:

What percentage of today was reactive versus proactive? Track it. Write it down. See what the pattern tells you.

What percentage of today was spent in gratitude? Ownership and gratitude go together.

How much of today was spent taking care of yourself? Did you meditate? Go for a walk? Invest in something that matters to you?

How much of today did you own? This is the big one. Because freedom is control in your own life. Not in a control freak way. In a design your own life way.

The reason ownership mentality matters isn't because it sounds good on a leadership poster. It matters because it's the streamlined process to get you to happiness and joy. That's what's actually important in one's life.

Ready to hear the full conversation? Press play above. George shares the complete story of the party that changed everything, the framework of words that build ownership, and why his dad's four simple words became the foundation for how he lives today.