The Power of Five Ideas: Freedom, Growth, and the Courage to Begin Again
Five reflections on liberty, delay, and the will to begin again
The Art of Becoming is about turning obstacles into opportunities. Drawing from philosophy, resilience, and real-life experiences, I share lessons on navigating adversity, cultivating wisdom, and living with purpose.
Life isn’t about avoiding hardships. It’s about becoming someone who thrives in it.
We won’t always have the answers, but we can search for them together.
I hope you’ll join me.
It has been several months since I’ve written a Power of Five post. This week’s post wrote itself. Like it needed to be told.
And it begins with two uncomfortable truths:
Freedom isn’t a guarantee.
And growth isn’t automatic.
This week’s Power of Five explores what it means to begin again, to choose joy amid chaos, and to confront the uncomfortable truths that still shape our lives.
Let’s get to it.
Why Juneteenth Is Important
Yesterday was Juneteenth. It is a long-overlooked and rarely understood day in American history.
Celebrated for generations by Black communities, Juneteenth remained largely unknown to most white Americans—either ignored, dismissed, or forgotten.
It also marks one of American history's most significant—and shameful—delays.
More than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, over 250,000 Black men, women, and children in Texas remained enslaved until Union troops arrived in Galveston on June 19, 1865, to enforce their freedom.
Juneteenth is not just a commemoration of emancipation. It is a mirror—held up to a nation that proclaimed liberty as a national ideal while protecting slavery and continues to struggle with the gap between its founding ideals and lived reality.
To understand Juneteenth is to confront the truth:
On July 4, 1776, the colonies declared themselves independent from England. Free from their policies and laws. Free to determine their own destiny. But it was not a day of independence for women, Native Americans, and especially the enslaved. The United States is a great country, but freedom is not something they have shared or given to everyone.
On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that all enslaved people were free by the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been signed by Abraham Lincoln more than two years earlier, on January 1, 1863.
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” — General Order No. 3
The Proclamation was not the end of slavery in America—but it was the final enforcement of emancipation in the deepest reaches of the former Confederacy. Texas had remained largely untouched by Union troops, and enslavers there deliberately withheld news of freedom from over 250,000 Black Americans (Gates Jr., The Root, 2013). In many cases, the enslavers forced enslaved people to work through the harvest season before being released.
Juneteenth does not mark the beginning of freedom.
It marks the delay of it.
It forces us to reckon with what historian Annette Gordon-Reed calls the “original sin” of the American republic—slavery—and how its legacies of violence, delay, and denial continue to shape the country (On Juneteenth, 2021).
Why it still matters
For many white Americans, Juneteenth was invisible until it became a federal holiday in 2021—thanks mainly to decades of grassroots organizing, particularly by Opal Lee, a 94-year-old activist who campaigned tirelessly for national recognition.
However, visibility is not the same as understanding.
Juneteenth makes some uncomfortable because it tells the truth:
Freedom was not freely given to the enslaved. America's slave owners fought, resisted, delayed, and even died to keep freedom from the enslaved.
That America’s founding promise of liberty was never universal.
And that the systems that enslaved millions did not simply vanish—they evolved. Jim Crow, for example.
Our Founding Fathers were responsible for that delay, keeping the independence they demanded for themselves from hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children they enslaved. Samuel Johnson would pose the question in 1777:
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
That discomfort is not a problem. It’s the beginning of a reckoning.
To understand Juneteenth is to confront how this country has repeatedly chosen delay over justice—and how, even today, Black Americans continue to face racialized disparities in wealth, health, housing, education, and policing (Pew Research Center, 2020).
Why Juneteenth is not just Black History
Juneteenth isn’t just a celebration of emancipation. It’s a mirror held up to the nation.
It reminds us that justice delayed is not justice fulfilled. That legal freedom is not the same as lived freedom. And that we, as a country, have not confronted the sins of our past. In many ways, they're still present.
Juneteenth is not just Black history.
It is American history.
And if we are to become the nation we claim to be, we must learn to remember—not just our triumphs, but our sins too.
Sources:
Henry Louis Gates Jr., What Is Juneteenth?, The Root (2013)
Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth (Liveright, 2021)
Pew Research Center, Views on Race in America (2020)
Digital History, “Quakers Address the Problem of Slavery”: analysis of Samuel Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny and his famous critique.
National Museum of African American History and Culture, Juneteenth
The one framework you must avoid at all costs
Deferred happiness is a common trap that we often fall into.
It is the lie we tell ourselves—that our happiness depends on achieving a specific goal or reaching a particular event. This belief frames happiness as a destination instead of a state of being. A choice.
We say: “I’ll be happy when…”
When I get a better job.
When I get married.
When I’m debt-free.
When I write a bestseller.
This constant run of deferring happiness traps us between growing and becoming. We become prisoners of a distant promise, always unsatisfied and unfulfilled. And as we wait, life slips by.
The Australian Institute, a leadership and policy think tank, observed this trend among Australians in 2004: People sacrificed their present happiness for a future payoff that rarely delivered.
There is a difference between delayed gratification and deferred happiness. There is a link between delayed gratification and success and well-being. It is discipline: resisting the pull of impulse for the sake of something better. The latter is denial: postponing happiness and peace until we cross some imaginary finish line.
But with deferred happiness, the finish line is always moving. You achieve one goal, only to set another. And another. Always believing the next one will finally make you whole.
The key to avoiding this framework is to stop attaching external achievements or things to our happiness.
Happiness isn’t found in your achievement or on the other side of your bucket list. It does not lie in the arms of another. Your joy is a state of mind you cultivate and choose, independent of your circumstances. It is a decision. A way of being.
Being happy for no reason is the radical choice to be at peace in the face of uncertainty. To be joyful not after the storm, but as it rages.
Within your choice to be happy, though the world rages, as your bills remained unpaid, while the cancer still lingers, and the other side of your bed lies empty, a spark of a perfect moment blooms. In this imperfect world that constantly boils over with malevolence and violence, sometimes all we need is a brief second of joy to carry us between the thousand raw and broken moments.
Don’t wait for the world to give you permission to feel alive. To be happy. Just choose to be.
Turn one day into Day One
This is the ultimate framework for growth and reinvention. For overcoming every obstacle.
Every day is Day One.
You are not trapped by yesterday's failures or defined by past mistakes.
Or obligated to retell the same story.
Day One thinking discards strict adherence to dogma. You learn from history but are not bound by it.
Each sunrise is a clean slate. Day One thinking is an opportunity to start over.
A new day to heal.
To rebuild and evolve.
Make today your Day One.
Then do it again tomorrow.
Learning to surrender leads to freedom
“Surrender and the problem ceases to be: When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance. I am very certain now that…” Letter from Henry Miller to Anais Nin.
Surrender not because the problem goes away, but because your resistance to it does.
Freedom begins when you understand you control nothing except your thoughts and attitudes. It is how you respond to what happens to you. Victor Frankel calls this the last freedom.
You are responsible for one thing:
How you choose to think.
What you choose to believe.
The attitude you bring to each moment.
A man can spit on you, beat you, throw you in prison, try to kill you, but he cannot take away how you choose to think about him, yourself, and the world.
As Viktor Frankl said:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
That’s where your freedom lives.
Not in escape or conquest, but in surrendering to the belief that you control anything but your response.
A Quote I’m Pondering
Progress is simply not possible if you live safely inside your comfort zone every day. —Arnold Schwarzenegger
I’m ambitiously lazy.
I've tried every shortcut, and if there were a way to grow and own a cheat code in life, I would have found it.
But there isn’t one.
Progress requires pain. It demands discomfort.
You must be uncomfortable, fighting, and scratching for every inch in life.
If there is a cheat code, it’s this:
No discomfort, no growth.
No fighting, no moving forward.
To quote Stan Lee: “Nuff said.”
Thanks for reading. Don’t wait until one day. Start Day One right now.
Love to you and yours,
Michael
