Navigating the starting lines and the finish lines of Your Life

What if the moment you thought ended everything was actually the beginning of everything?

In this episode, George and Liz explore one of the most misunderstood concepts in personal growth: starting lines. Not just the obvious beginnings, but the moments we don't recognize as starting lines until we're miles down the road. George shares two deeply personal stories that shaped who he became, and together they unpack why understanding your starting lines might be the key to reaching a finish line you never thought possible.

More Than One Starting Line

Most people think about starting lines as something at the beginning of their life. Something good or something bad, but a moment cemented in the brain forever.

George sees it differently.

"You don't only have one starting line. You have multiple starting lines. And many times, our starting lines that we point to have some type of negative connotation."

But here's what changes everything: there are actually two sides to every starting line. There's where you're setting up, and there's the step you took after. A positive and a negative side. You just have to take time to find them.

The One-Room Log Cabin

George's first starting line was a place called Lincoln, Montana.

"When we lived in Lincoln, Montana, we lived in a one room log cabin. And we're talking about the type of log cabin that is no running water, one room, super old. We're talking about in the mountains, very small beginning. We used to bathe in the river beside the cabin."

The negative interpretation was obvious. Started out small. Life destined to be small. Who was he going to become? The son of a logger living in a one-room log cabin with no running water.

"For many years of my life, I did feel like, who am I gonna become?"

But then he looked at the photographs.

"There are pictures of me riding the crap out of my big wheel. There are pictures of me standing beside trees with the biggest smile ever. So while my older self, when I say older I mean 9, 10, 13, 14, was looking at that as a negative as I was going through it, you can fully tell looking back now that I was enjoying the crap out of it. I didn't care if it was half of a room. I didn't care if we didn't have hot water."

The reframe: "I am so thankful that I started out in a one room log cabin with no running water because I know what humble beginnings are. I know what salt of the earth truly means. I can tie back to those moments and as big as the brand gets, as boisterous as I choose to be, it's very easy for me to draw myself back into a very humble, quiet, salt of the earth type human. And it really is one of the things I've learned that helps me keep ego at bay."

The Math Teacher's Words

The second starting line hit harder.

At about age 17, George was a freshman in high school. He was being a bit of a class clown, which tracks. He likes to have fun and make people laugh now. Go figure he liked doing it at the beginning too.

Then his math teacher told him, in front of the entire class, that he would never amount to anything.

"What's crazy is I believed him. And within 6 months, I was a high school dropout."

His parents signed him into the Navy, and the rest became history. But there was always this negative starting line echoing in his head: You must be stupid. You can't conform. You aren't gonna be anything.

"This was like a double tap on the small beginnings. You need to be small. You can't be great. The whole time I was kind of trying to live life, I kept having this feeling like I was supposed to do something special. I was destined for greatness. But there were these two starting lines that were just heavyweights mentally for me to try to get past."

From Wanting to Punch Him to Wanting to Thank Him

Then hindsight kicked in.

"There was a time that if you ask me if I wanted to go see my math teacher, it would have been because I wanted to go punch him in the face. But if you ask me now if I would wanna go back and see my math teacher, I would say absolutely. Because I wanna thank him."

Here's the shift: Just because somebody says something to you in a negative light doesn't mean it won't equal positive reactions.

"It's his words that actually forced me to pick up this mindset of always be learning. I would even say that it's probably his words and this 'always be learning' that has taught me to be a transition specialist, to be so willing to pivot from one thing to another."

What was a negative starting line became fuel.

"At first, the fire that burns in my belly was to prove somebody wrong. But now it's just the belief that I can do it."

Every Ending Is a New Beginning

Liz pushes on this. That moment in the classroom, wasn't that an ending rather than a beginning? The teacher was essentially saying: Game over before you even get out of the starting gate.

George's response: "It took me years to realize the words that are gonna just kind of flow out of my mouth. And that is, I realized that every ending is a new beginning."

Every decision you make ends something and begins something else.

"That was the end of high school for me. Yes. Would I never be prom king my senior year? Would I never walk across and get the diploma? Yeah. It was endings to a lot of things. But it was the immediate beginning of who I would become."

It was the beginning of stories about almost dying in the Navy. Almost dying in a motorcycle accident at Faith Ranch. The beginning of the story God has given him for 51 years on this planet.

"When one door shuts, another one opens. You've heard your mother, your father, your grandma, somebody say that in the past, and you're like, yeah. Nice saying. But here's the thing. If you really have this understanding that every end is a new beginning, there should be a time of mourning and then an immediate surge of excitement for what is about to happen."

Can You Recognize Starting Lines in the Moment?

Liz asks whether this is purely a retrospective exercise or something we can train ourselves to see in real time.

George is honest: For most people, it's retrospective.

"When we won tickets in 2012 to Inbound and I learned about HubSpot, did I realize that was gonna be the starting point, the precipice for a major segment of my life and who I would become? Zero clue in the moment. I knew something special was happening, but zero clue of how deeply defined a starting line that was."

But he believes we can train ourselves to notice the cues.

"They can get real touchy feely. There's gonna be a gut. There's gonna be a voice. There's gonna just be a feeling. Think of the photons, electrons, the protons, all of those tons are just doing something in your body. And sometimes we just ignore all of that because we're so inundated with music all the time or city noise."

When you can quiet yourself and pay attention, you can find those starting lines before you're looking back at them. Then you can drive harder, faster, more strategized into them.

"A starting line that I knew definitively that I was creating was starting my own business. I couldn't look retrospective at that. I had to be aggressively like, this is what I'm going to do because I got the gut, got the voice, all the tons are telling me that this is the line I'm supposed to draw and where I'm supposed to run."

Why Starting Lines Matter

One of the things George has in his office is a whiteboard that he walks past every day. It says: You've come a long way since 2013.

"It makes me stop, and it makes me think of the journey. If you have those defined starting lines, it makes it way easier to look at your midpoint, your milestone that you're at in life right now and go, jeez. Remember that guy? Remember that girl? Like, holy mackerel. They had no clue."

That should give you great joy. Because now you have more than a clue. You have probably many clues that the human of 2013 or 1970 or whatever your point is didn't have.

But there's a bigger reason starting lines matter.

"I just wish everybody listening to this knew how important their story is. You have been given a set of stories that when told at the right time in the right way will impact those around you. It's your way of putting a little dent in the universe."

Every story has a beginning and every story has an end. If you can pay attention to those beginnings and endings of the micro stories you're given, and the power and lessons in them, you will do amazing things.

"That is living a life beyond your default. Because now it's not just the typical 'what's in it for me.' It's 'how can I make the lives of those around me better by the stories I have been given?'"

The Questions That Unlock Everything

When George evaluates a starting line, he goes through a process of rotating around it in 360 degrees.

The first layer of questions is about himself: How do you feel about this? Why do you feel that way about this? Should you feel that way? What's a different way that you might think?

The second layer is about others: How do they feel? What caused this? Is there something going on in their life?

Even with the log cabin story, there were other people involved.

"It was my mom and my dad. They made a decision. They were part of the story. So why did they move to Lincoln, Montana? How did they feel about Ohio? What were they running from? What were they trying to build? Where were they trying to go?"

He uses an analogy from theater. In a play, all the actors have to understand a large portion of the parts that other people are going to play so they know when to say their lines.

"But so many times in life, we get in this role of like, I just know my lines, and my lines really pissed me off. Instead of, oh, well, I have these lines because these people were doing or saying these things."

He also recommends the 7 Whys, asking why you gave the answer to the question you just asked, seven times deep.

"Because when you ask why 7 times, it gets you down to a deeper rooted actual real reason of something."

Warning: "Don't be afraid to dig. But also realize that when you start to dig, it gets uncomfortable. You have to get real comfortable with being uncomfortable if you wanna unlock some of these lessons."

The Uncomfortable Truth About Learning

Liz asks for the most uncomfortable but powerful learning George forced himself to look at through evaluating his own starting lines.

He doesn't hold back.

"There's a lot of years that I thought I was stupid. That I was a simpleton. That I couldn't learn. That I would forever be a lower class citizen doing a lower class job because that's where I belonged."

When he started asking why and trying to get a 360-degree view, the lesson he had to unlock was this: Not all words are true. And more importantly: I can learn anything.

When he was younger, people would say: "Move that boy's like a sponge. He just gets around something. He soaks it up."

But he had blocked those sayings out of his brain. They didn't resurface until he got aggressive about proving to himself that he could learn.

It started out of necessity. He was a youth pastor, and the church needed graphics for worship songs and a website. Nobody else was going to do it.

"When you feel like you're stupid and the words 'I can figure that out' come out of your mouth, it's kinda scary."

But he taught himself HTML and CSS in the GeoCities days. Learned graphics in a pre-Photoshop program called Photo Draw. Started watching videos on Lynda.com, which is now LinkedIn Learning.

"As I would unlock each kind of new lesson and new thing, and I would start to build a website or design a slide, there were these little elements that kept coming into my brain. Like, see? See? You're not stupid. You're not stupid. Let's see how smart you can be. Hey. How far can you take this? What can you learn?"

This is what unlocked everything. Podcasting. Video editing. HubSpot. All of it.

"My brain is no longer scared of just plugging in new modules of education into it because I realize that the computer system can handle the upgrades."

Mindset and the Rearview Mirror

Liz makes an observation: Because George believed he wasn't capable of learning, he didn't look for signs or evidence that supported a contrary view.

This is confirmation bias. We look for evidence of what we already believe.

"Our brains as humans, they can be our best friend or our worst enemy. For me, I realized that 'he's like a sponge,' my brain thought it was protecting me. But it actually was just hiding little secrets that I really needed to know."

When he started to believe he had the potential to become smart, which he was the entire time, his brain released those stored nuggets.

"Once I had them, man, I grabbed onto that bad boy. And I would literally tell myself: My boss wants me to learn about podcasting. I'm a sponge. I will go, and I will soak this up, and I will be the best at podcasting."

His message to listeners: "Inside of your brain as you're listening to this, there are nuggets that once you start to transform your belief structure in what your starting line meant to the world that you live right now, you'll start to remember."

And when you do: "Write them down. Claw at them. Grab them. Hug them. Hold them tight. Because they are going to be the ammo or the energy or the fuel for your brain that you'll bring up over and over and over again as you then use that as your new weapon to becoming the best you ever."

What He Would Tell That Boy

Liz asks the final question: If you could go back to that classroom after the teacher told you that you weren't going to amount to anything, what would you tell yourself?

George gets emotional. He envisions himself as who he is today, kneeling next to that boy.

Three things come to mind.

First: "It's gonna be okay."

Second: "You're gonna do great things."

Third: "This is all part of the process."

"We have our plan and then there's the plan. And that day in that classroom was the starting line of the plan. It definitely wasn't my plan. But the plan has worked out really, really well."

He knows that boy probably wouldn't have believed his own words. Just like he didn't believe his parents when they tried to comfort him.

"But that is what I would wanna share with that child. Look, you're gonna be okay. You're gonna do great things. This is part of the process. There is a plan, and you are being activated. You are being called into what people are going to need you to be. But buddy, it's gonna get difficult. But you're gonna be strong enough to make it through it. And one day, you're gonna be able to help so many people through the hard times of their life. So push forward."

Quotable Moments

"You don't only have one starting line. You have multiple starting lines."

"Just because somebody says something to you and it might not be in a positive light, doesn't mean that it won't equal positive reactions."

"Every ending is a new beginning. And I don't mean to sound trite when I say that. But if you truly pay attention to every decision that you make, it is ending something and beginning something else."

"I just wish everybody listening to this knew how important their story is."

"Your brain is no longer scared of just plugging in new modules of education because the computer system can handle the upgrades."

"There is a plan, and you are being activated."

Your One Thing

George's takeaway: Your starting line doesn't dictate your finish line. If your starting line has felt like a weight holding you back, take a minute and look for the positives of that potential negative place you've cemented in your brain. The tools you thought were burdens might actually be the tools you need to survive and flourish in the world you're headed toward.

Liz's takeaway: Mindset determines what you see in your rearview mirror. If you believe you're incapable of something, your brain will hide the evidence that says otherwise. When you shift your belief structure, those hidden nuggets start to surface. Write them down. They're the fuel you've been looking for.

Reflection Questions

1. What starting line have you been pointing to as the reason you can't reach a certain finish line? What would happen if you looked for the positive side of that moment?
2. Have you been treating an ending as the end of your story instead of the beginning of a new one? What might be starting right now that you can't see yet?
3. What beliefs about yourself might be causing your brain to hide evidence that proves you wrong?
4. If you could go back and kneel next to your younger self at one of your starting lines, what would you say?
5. George has a whiteboard that says "You've come a long way since 2013." What would your whiteboard say?

Ready to go deeper? Press play above and hear George walk through the 360-degree process for evaluating your starting lines. If you've ever felt like where you started is holding you back from where you want to go, this episode will show you how to rewrite that narrative.