Mid-Year RESET: Your Second Chance at 2025 (4 Min Read) | Vol. 159

I’m sure many of you have been following the floods that swept through the Texas Hill Country over 4th of July weekend. We’re heartbroken over the lives lost and homes destroyed. If you’d like to help, please consider donating to the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund, which is run by The Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, a 501(c)(3). Thank you. 🙏

July 11, 2025

“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.” – Mary Pickford

Mid-Year RESET: Your Second Chance at 2025

Recently, our head coach Jordan Freed shared an exchange he had with a client. She was beating herself up for her lack of progress on a goal. He asked her, “What if we pretended that today wasn’t July 1st but rather January 1st? How would you feel about your progress?” That prompt helped her reset her attitude and self-talk.

Thinking linearly from January 1st to December 31st is just a convention. We can’t pursue every goal every day, all starting on day one. We have to line up our priorities one by one—success is sequential after all.

If you’re feeling behind on your 2025 goals, you’re not alone. By mid-year, most people are off track. Life happens. Business gets complex. The things you thought were important in January either got lost in the shuffle or are no longer relevant.

Here’s the thing: You still have nearly six months of runway. That’s plenty of time to course correct and finish strong. What you need is a framework to get back on track.

In this week’s episode of The ONE Thing podcast, I cover our mid-year RESET Process. It’s a five-step process we’ve been teaching for years. Here’s how it works:

The RESET Process

R – Reflect
Pull out your goals from January. Can you even find them? If not, that’s telling. Look at what you set out to accomplish this year. How are you doing? More importantly, how do you feel about your progress? Identify the gaps that matter. 

Go through your calendar and photos to reconnect with what you’ve achieved so far. Goal-driven people tend to focus relentlessly on what’s next while neglecting to note their progress. Take a beat and celebrate. 

Just like restarting your laptop, a fresh inventory of your goals is the first step to a hard reset. 

E – Evaluate
Now get specific about the gaps. If you wanted to read 50 books this year, you should be at about 25 by now. Are you at 21? That’s only a four-book gap which you can make up with a little focus over time. Or are you at 12? That’s a bigger challenge requiring more aggressive action.

Prioritize your remaining goals. If you could only knock out one this year, which would it be? What about a second? Rank them so you’re crystal clear on what matters most.

S – Simplify
This may be the most important step. It’s time to get your scissors out and start cutting. What goals are no longer relevant and can be dispatched? What goals can you delay until 2026? What activities on your calendar are completely disconnected from your priorities?

Your schedule is overdue for a manicure. Look for meetings you can skip, commitments you can reduce, and distractions you can eliminate. When you say ‘yes’ to something, you’re saying ‘no’ to everything else.

E – Establish
For each remaining goal, identify the one activity that will have the biggest impact. Not the outcome—the activity. If your goal is to lose seven pounds, the activity might be meal prepping, calorie tracking, or logging your 10,000 steps.

Be specific and make it accountable. Vague intentions lead to vague results.

T – Time Block
Here’s where intention meets reality. You cannot time block outcomes, but you CAN time block activities. Open your calendar and create firm appointments with yourself for the activities you just identified.

Research shows you’re three times more likely to achieve something when it’s scheduled. Your calendar should reflect your priorities, not just your obligations.

The Power of Constraints

In this week’s podcast, I share a story about the biomedical sales team that went from the bottom quartile to number two in the company. They had even less time than you do—just one quarter—but they focused on one product and one customer. Constraints forced innovation.

When Steven Spielberg’s mechanical shark kept malfunctioning during the filming of Jaws, he was forced to suggest the shark rather than show it. That constraint made the movie scarier and more successful than anyone imagined.

You have constraints too—less than six months and competing priorities. But limitations often lead to breakthroughs. When you’re forced to choose, you choose what matters most.

Your Second Chance

The beautiful thing about a mid-year reset is that you get to start fresh without waiting for January 1st. You have the wisdom of six months of experience and the motivation that comes from seeing the finish line.

Don’t lower your goals just to say you hit them. Keep them ambitious and let them pull you forward. How you finish 2025 is how you’ll start 2026.

The calendar says it’s July, but your goals don’t have to know that.

One question to ponder in your thinking time: What would change if I treated today like a bonus New Year’s Day?

Make an Impact!
Jay Papasan
Co-author of The ONE Thing & The Millionaire Real Estate Agent