A few months ago I got a text from my 75-year old dad. The text said “SOS”.

Attached was a picture of a MASSIVE tree that had fallen over in a storm, barely missing the camper parked in my parents' driveway.

My dad asked if my brother and I could come help clear the tree, since he’s not able to do that kind of work anymore.

I can’t stress enough how big this tree was. I would guess it was probably 40 feet tall before it fell. I could barely get my arms around the trunk. Not only that, but it hadn’t fallen all the way over yet. The roots were still in the ground, and the tree had landed on some of its branches.

This meant that this massive, heavy tree still had more falling to do. And that falling was going to happen as my brother and I were working on it.

As soon as I saw the tree in person, I knew this was going to take the entire day, and I had stuff I needed to get done that day.

I started thinking of all the things that could go wrong:

• If we cut the wrong branch, the tree could fall on one of us
• If the tree shifted, it could hit the camper
• One of us (it turned out to be me) was going to have to climb ten feet into the air, on a hillside, with a chainsaw, to cut the trunk. While standing on said trunk.
• I have a bad back, and I could easily tweak it lifting big logs.
• Etc. etc. etc.

As it turns out, none of those things happened.

In fact, with the help of a tractor and grapple attachment, my brother and I were able to safely clear the entire tree in maybe an hour and a half. We made a giant pile of all the brush, stacked the big logs for firewood, and were done in time for lunch.

And as much as I hate to admit it, the whole thing was actually pretty fun.

Afterwards, I opened a new note on my phone and titled it “Catastrophes Avoided”.
Since then, I’ve started keeping track of times when my intuition told me something terrible was about to happen, and then it just… didn’t.

• The time my truck was having trouble starting, and I was convinced it would be the starter, which is notoriously difficult and expensive (like, over a thousand dollars) to replace on this particular model. It turned out to be a bad battery, which was about a hundred bucks.
• The time I showed up to an airport and realized that, due to a miscommunication, I didn’t have a rental car. The airport was sold out and my hotel was over an hour away in an area without a lot of Uber availability. I ended up finding a driver who not only took me the whole way, but graciously stopped for me to grab dinner.
• The time an important Amazon order got rerouted to the wrong distribution center on the day I needed it. A few phone calls, a drive across town, and I had it in hand.

I started keeping track of these things because my brain refuses to do it for me. ​
For whatever reason, my brain would much rather remember all the times things went wrong, or things went sideways, or I made a mess of things and embarrassed myself.

But now I have a growing body of proof that says “Hey, you’re not telling the whole story here! You’re picking and choosing the worst examples. Let me show you some counterexamples.”

More than that, I have a list of stories that prove that when I get into a tricky situation, I have a history of being able to figure it out.
So when I get into tricky situations in the future, I know I can probably figure those out as well.

I find myself coming back to this note when I’m up against a problem and I’m tempted to start catastrophizing.

This does a few things.

First, it helps me calm down and realize that things will probably not be as bad as I’m imagining.

Second, it shows me all the fun stories that came out of past “catastrophes”, and it almost gets me excited thinking about the stories that might come from this one.

But most importantly, it helps me to stop freaking out and start focusing on a solution. And nine times out of ten, that’s all I need to get back on track.

This week, start noticing your wins.
Start keeping track of the times when you got yourself out of a sticky situation, solved an overwhelmingly daunting problem, or avoided disaster. Write them down somewhere.
Keep writing them down.
​Make a living, breathing, document of your resilience.

You’ll be glad you did.

Happy Friday, friends. Make it a good one.

Kyle Scheele
Creativity, Innovation, and Tree Removal Expert
​www.KyleScheele.com​

P.S. My new book, How Ideas Work, is a hands-on guide to creative problem solving. Whether you're trying to write your first novel, start your first company, or remove a large tree from your dad's camper, the book will show you exactly what it takes to start solving big problems with even bigger ideas. You can preorder a copy here.​