The Multi-Branch Decision Tree Less Traveled By

Or, How to Make the World a Better Place . . . . .

The title of this post is, of course, an homage to one of my favorite poems of all time, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost:

I first read this poem in high school and like many of its fans, I committed it to memory. It speaks to finding your own path, not being afraid to make choices that don’t appear to be the most obvious, popular or safe, and taking pride when you reflect on the journey.

Back in the good ole days when I used to write more regularly, I wrote about my view that where we wake up every morning is the direct result of every decision we made in life prior to going to bed the night before. Some decisions are obviously more consequential than others, but we are, in the end, the sum total of all those decisions.

Of course, we do not live in isolation and as a friend of mine was quick to point out to me, often people’s lives are impacted by someone else’s decisions. These impacts can be both positive or negative (my friend’s comment specifically focused on the negative side of that equation). So, on further reflection, I guess I need to modify my earlier statement:

Every morning when we wake up, we are exactly where we are supposed to be, based on all the decisions we have directly made, as well as all the decisions anyone else has made that in some way impacted our life.

When you think about that statement, from the macro perspective, it is a pretty daunting realization. Because all those decisions, taken in the aggregate, are an infinite fucking number. In many ways it comes back to the age-old debate between self-determination and destiny.

One line from The Road Not Taken that has always stuck with me is the last line in the third stanza: Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

There are some decisions in life that are truly like the branches on a multi-variate decision tree:

Everything on the tree above moves from left to right. If you go up or down at the first decision point, every possibility after that is limited to the subsequent paths down those branches. Once we start down a certain path, as Frost says, “way leads on to way” and everything after that point is consequent to that earlier decision.

Recently I was back in Michigan for the funeral of a high school teammate of mine. I was not especially close with Jeff, but his brother Kenny is one of the 5 or so guys from high school that I have remained in close contact with over the years. And their father, Doug, was my first football coach in 1975 (he’s second from the left in the back row of the picture below. The kid standing in front of him with the big ass forehead - yeah, that’s me). I can still hear his booming voice shouting across the Whitmore Bolles’ fields where we practiced every weeknight. So my decision to go back for the funeral was as much about supporting my friend and my respect for the whole family and what they have meant to my life as it was specifically about paying my respects to Jeff.

One of the guys who spoke at Jeff’s funeral was one of his classmates, Randy. It made total sense that Randy would speak at the funeral, and yet, having not seen him in at least 38 years, seeing him was something I hadn’t considered and it kind of caught me off guard. Because as I stood there, listening to him speak, I was looking at someone that I knew 41 years ago had played a pivotal role in the path my life took. And it struck me as I thought to myself that he had no idea that this was the case.

I spoke earlier about the consequential decisions we make in our lifetimes – the decisions that take us down a path from which we never come back to the prior point on the decision tree. No doubt one of the most consequential decisions I’ve ever made in my lifetime was the decision to study and play football at the University of Pennsylvania after graduating from high school in 1983. It is literally an incontrovertible fact that the last 39 years of my life would be completely different if I had made a different choice at that point.

Every person I’ve met since I arrived on the Penn campus, all the friendships I have developed since then, moving to Japan, meeting my wife when I returned from Japan (she went to high school with one of my closest friends from Penn), where I’ve lived, where I’ve worked, my children, anyone I may have helped or had a positive impact on in my adult life including the two friends I introduced to each other several years ago that subsequently got married. Every one of those things, and countless more, would be different in some material way or never happened at all.

And . . . were it not for a 20 second conversation I had with Randy in the Spring of 1981 . . . my being in a position to decide to go to Penn would have never happened.

As I mentioned earlier, my friend Kenny’s dad was my first football coach in 1975. I played Little League (“T-Bird”) football for 4 years, from 1975 – 1978. But a funny things happens when boys reach puberty and start the process of going from boys to men. We all change at a different rate. And I had the misfortune (at least that’s how it felt at the time) of being what is known as a “late bloomer.” In the Fall of 1979 and 1980, I was one of the smaller, skinnier kids in 9th and 10th grade. As a result, I didn’t play football those years. And while I had started to catch up physically by the Spring of 1981, after not playing for two seasons, while all the other guys I had played T-Bird football with had continued to hone their football skills, it was not in any way, shape or form likely that I was going to play football again heading into my junior year in high school. The thought had not even crossed my mind.

Forty-one years later, in the Spring of 2022, I was staring at the guy who put that thought in my head. After Jeff’s funeral service was over, we all gathered at a local watering hole to celebrate Jeff’s life. After milling around and catching up with a few people, I approached Randy to say hello. After the normal pleasantries you exchange with someone you haven’t seen in almost 40 years, I anxiously blurted out “Dude, I’ve got to tell you something, and it is seriously going to blow your mind.”

In the second or two it took him to process that statement, he gave me the kind of look you would expect someone to make when a person they haven’t seen in such a long time makes that kind of crazy ass statement. It was sort of like “Oh fuck, is this dude crazy? Where’s the nearest exit?? FUCK!!” I said, “OK, I know that sounds crazy. But trust me, this is a good one. You ready?”

“O . . . . kaaaaaaayyyyyyyy,” he said, very slowly, still looking for the chord to pull to get off this potential runaway train wreck.

“Alright,” I said. “Well, you know what an important role football has played in my life, right?” Randy played college football at Grand Valley State after high school and so I knew that he could appreciate how much of an impact an experience like that has on anyone’s life. “I mean my entire life would literally be different right now if I hadn’t gone to Penn and played football.”

He still wasn’t quite sure where I was going with all this, but he agreed that this was an accurate statement. “Yeah, sure,” he said.

“OK, well here’s where it gets crazy,” I said. “You know, like you, I played T-Bird football growing up. But I was a late bloomer, and I ended up not playing football in 9th or 10th grade.” “Oh really?” Randy said, “I didn’t remember that!” Literally no one else remembers this fact – it’s all fuzzy in everyone’s memory. We played little league together, we played high school together. The period in between – it’s all mashed together. No one remembers it except me – because I was the one who had to live through that period in purgatory.

I kept going with the story. “So,” I continued, undaunted. “In the Spring of 1981, I had no thought of playing football that Fall. None. I was convinced my football playing days were over. We were on the track team together that Spring and you had already been selected as a captain for the football team that Fall. And one day during a track practice, you just looked at me and out of the blue you said ‘Hey, you used to play T-Bird football, didn’t you?’ And I said ‘Yeah, I did.’ And then you said, ‘Well why aren’t you playing now?’ And I thought about it for a second and responded, ‘I don’t know . . . . .’”

And then I said, “Dude, if we don’t have that conversation, if you don’t ask me why I’m not still playing football any longer, I don’t know if I would’ve ever refound my love of the game. I don’t know if I ever would’ve come back to it. And if I don’t come back to football, I don’t go to Penn. And literally my entire life would be different right now. I haven’ seen you in nearly 40 years, but I guarantee you that I have thought about that 20 second conversation at least once a week for as long as I can remember. Because it changed the course of my life.”

I’m not trying to embarrass him, but at that point, when he fully understood what I was saying, Randy got a little bit misty eyed. And honestly, I’m sure I was probably a little bit misty eyed at that moment as well. It had been something I had thought about for such a long time, and it felt good to finally share that story with the other participant in that pivotal conversation. And to let him know that although it was not something that was intentional or that he even knew or thought about before I told him about it, that I was thankful and appreciative for how that conversation had influenced the path my life took.

The take away from all this . . .

You never know when a 20 second conversation can have a positive impact on someone’s life. You never know when someone you are speaking with may be at a point of two roads diverging in a yellow wood and how a few words of encouragement can put them on a positive path. It can happen at any moment, when you least expect it.

That doesn’t mean you need to try to influence someone’s life. You don’t need to put that kind of pressure on yourself. Randy wasn’t trying to alter the course of my life when he asked me that question. He just loved football, and as one of the captains for the upcoming season, he was doing his best to try to make sure the team had as many guys that could maybe help the team as possible. He had no reason to know or to expect that I would find the determination and passion that would result in not just two years of high school football, but subsequently two years as a starter at Penn as a member of 3 Ivy Championship teams. He didn’t have to know any of that. He just had to be who he was and to share that with those he came into contact with.

The same goes for all of us. Life is not a zero-sum game. Believe in abundance and give freely of yourself without any expectation of anything in return. Sharing your talents and passions with others is its own reward. The world will be a better place. And maybe, when you least expect it, maybe many years after the fact, some nutty person will tell you how some small gesture or words of encouragement on your part had a profound impact on their life.

Two roads diverged in a wood. I had a 20 second conversation with a guy who challenged me to take the road less traveled by. I accepted the challenge. And THAT has made all the difference.

Randy, I swear, this is the last time . . . thank you brother!