From time to time, everyone is faced with a problem where the potential solutions are either simple or complex and you must choose one or the other.

I don’t know exactly what this means, but experience tells me that simpler is usually better.

The simpler the solution, the higher the chance of it actually working.

As I look back, the times that I chose the more complicated solution seem to be the times where the plan-of-attack got convoluted somehow and the ultimate solution to the problem got lost somewhere in the blur of life.

Simpler is better.

Or, at least – it seems that way to me in hindsight.

When I was six, I learned to drive a truck.

By myself.

And my dad taught me.

No, my dad didn’t teach me to drive a truck on purpose.  I guess at the time, you could call it more of a life-requirement. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.

But on that day that I learned to drive, I also learned much more than just where the gas pedal was, how the clutch and stick shift worked and how to steer.

On that day, I learned something about life.

Back in 1976 I lived with my family in Driggs, Idaho and if you know anything about Driggs, you know that it isn’t exactly Phoenix-weather from about September until April. It is cold there – so cold that when you go there, you will most likely call it a different kind of cold.

And it snows. A lot.

It snows so much that they have put up 6-foot-poles all along most of the roads, just so you can tell where the road is for the entire months of December, January and February.

Which means in August of 1976 I was out getting ready for winter… also known as “cutting firewood”.

My dad took me out in the forest to cut firewood and after hunting around for a while, he finally found a tree that looked like the perfect specimen to do the manly thing of firing up a chainsaw and going to work on an evergreen giant that seemed to be the size of the Washington Monument to a 6 year old.

After sawing for a few minutes on The Monument, he turned off his chainsaw and told me to get as far away as I could from the tree because it was about to fall.

So off I went.

I ran off into the forest as I heard him fire up his chainsaw again and go back to work.

I ran for a few seconds and then I suddenly heard his chainsaw stop.

I turned around to see if I had run far enough that the tree wouldn’t fall on me and was about to scream “DO YOU THINK THAT’S FAR ENOUGH DAD?”  and I realized that however far I had ran at that point was about as far as I was going to get.

The tree was coming right for me.

And I froze.

As in FROZE.

Down came the tree with a thundering roar and to this day, I swear that the top of that tree covered the tips of my shoes.

All I felt as I closed my eyes was a giant “whoosh” and then it hit me: I almost got hurt. Bad.

And all I could do was freak out. Not just a gentle freak out, but a frozen-to-the-ground-freak-out-like-Rainman-freak-out.

I screamed.

I cried.

I yelled for my dad.

But my dad was nowhere. I couldn’t hear him, I couldn’t see him.

And I was in a panic.

I kept yelling, crying, panicking.

But he never came.

After a few minutes, I finally calmed down to see where on earth my dad was and why in the world didn’t he come to save me. So I started walking down the end of The Monument and when I had gotten about halfway down the tree, I could hear my dad moaning and saw him laying on the ground.

When I finally got to him, it became clear that he had much bigger problems than telling me I would be okay after I was nearly crushed by The Monument – somehow The Monument had fell on him and crushed his leg. He looked at me as I got to him and said:

You are going to learn to drive today.

Clearly, if we both were going to make it back to town, someone who still wet the bed on occasion was going to become good friends with a Dodge pickup. We managed to get him in the truck and after a little coaching, we managed to get him back to town and into the hospital.

But the lesson I learned on that day, at that point in my life really wasn’t about driving.

Or making sure that should I ever be dumb enough have a desire to cut down Another Monument, I would make sure to stand on the other side of the tree as it fell.

No, the lesson I learned on that day was about others.

And perhaps Stephen Covey said it best when he included this in his 7 Habits:

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

And in practice today, before I freak out that someone else’s Monument fell really, really close to me and even possibly scuffed up my shoes as it fell – I head down to the other side of the tree to make sure they don’t have a broken leg.

And if they do, I try to load them in my pickup and drive them to the hospital.

Growing up in Flagstaff, Arizona I spent my fair share of time on the football practice field and I learned quite a few life lessons there – along with making a few great friends.

It was on that practice field where I got my first life-lesson that sometimes in life things just happen and that you can’t control things so that everything goes as planned.

The practice field has a great location and view and is situated just to the southwest of the main road to the Grand Canyon where you can see the almost-constant stream of traffic headed toward the Grand Canyon from the field.

One day, we were out playing around on the field before practice and all of the sudden we heard screeching tires and what-sounded-like-an explosion of metal and glass being blown up.

Not 100 yards from the field, there was a truck that got broad-sided by an oncoming car as the truck was pulling out on to the busy road.

“Hey, isn’t that Coach Vitt’s truck?” someone asked.

We all spent the next 10 minutes wondering if one of our assistant coaches was the driver of the truck that had just been involved in the metal and glass collision explosion.

Soon all of the rest of the coaches showed up for practice and they pulled us all away from the fence and got practice going as usual. They told us the usual “keep your mind of football” stuff and tried to keep us from watching the fire trucks and ambulances as the rescue workers did their thing.

We really couldn’t see exactly what was going on for the next 30 minutes or so because the emergency vehicles had managed to park in such a way that we couldn’t see anything from the field.

So I will never forget standing in a huddle, looking up and seeing Coach Vitt walk in-between two fire trucks, across the street, hop the practice field fence and walk over to the huddle.

Everyone on the field stopped what they were doing and just stared at him as he walked over.

Finally one of the head coaches broke the silence:

“Coach Vitt, are you okay?”

And I won’t forget his reply:

“Yeah, I am fine but my truck is completely totaled so I am going to need a ride home tonight. What can I say… life happens!”

And so it was.

In that one single moment, about 50 teenagers standing on a field in football helmets learned a valuable life lesson:

It isn’t how many times you get knocked down.

It isn’t what kind of bad things happen along the road of life.

It is all how you react to them.