We’re quickly approaching one of my favorite times of the year—Independence Day. Around this time, I like to take a step back to reflect on the year so far. So many of us set goals on January 1st, but few pause halfway through to ask: How’s it really going?
Are the goals you set in motion coming together? Did you lose the weight? Write the book? Start the business? Chase the dream you told yourself you’d go after this year?
Maybe you haven’t accomplished everything you planned. That’s okay. This moment isn’t just about reflection—it’s an opportunity. A reset. A do-over. The second half of the year is still unwritten. But it requires a mindset shift. We have to believe it’s possible.
It reminds me of a story about a man named Nicholas Sitzman. He worked on refrigerated boxcars in a train yard many years ago. One day, after his coworkers left, he accidentally got locked inside a freezer car. He screamed, he pounded on the walls—but no one heard him.
As the hours passed, Sitzman used a knife to carve messages into the wooden walls:
I’m becoming colder…
Still colder now…
Nothing to do but wait.
These may be my last words.
By morning, his coworkers found his lifeless body. He’d died of hypothermia.
But here’s the part that always sticks with me: the freezer car wasn’t on. It had no power. While the temperature dropped overnight, it wasn’t cold enough to kill him.
Sitzman didn’t die from the cold.
He died from what he believed was happening to him.
Our minds are powerful. What we tell ourselves, we start to believe.
So what are you telling yourself? That you’ll never lose the weight? Never write your book? That you haven’t made any progress so far this year—and probably never will?
The stories we tell ourselves matter. They shape how we act—and who we become.
So let’s change the narrative. Let’s focus on what is possible. Not that the year is halfway over—but that we have a full second half to become who we’re meant to be.
Let’s hit July with momentum. Let’s put in the work and make the kind of progress we’ll be proud of when the year comes to a close and we look back at the impact we made.
We’ve still got half a year left.
Let’s make it count. -Ken