Songfacts®:

• "The Secret of Life" was written by singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters. "I usually introduce this song, 'What if the Dalai Lama were a bartender?'" Peters told Songfacts. "It started as a little bit of nothing, really. I had a little bit of success with songs like 'Let That Pony Run,' and 'Independence Day,' a lot of what people in Nashville call 'Women's Songs,' which is a term that just makes my skin crawl. But songs from the point of view of women, whatever. I bristled a little bit at that, and I thought, I've spent like 10 years playing bars, hanging around guys. I know a thing or two about men. So that's how that song started.
  
  I just started with this sort of riffing on this 'Couple of guys sitting around drinking' kind of line. And it marched into sort of barroom philosophy at that point. I think my favorite line in that song is 'The secret of life, try not to hurry, but don't wait.' I love that sort of Zen-ness of all that. And once I sort of had my sights on that, I knew what I wanted to do, and it was just not that hard to write. It was just all about mostly listing things that to me really are the secret of life.
  
  The overall sentiment in the song is: it's moments. It's just moments, that's all it is. It's not one big thing, it's not a self-help book, it's not in a self-help book, it's just moments, and they come and they go, and the trick is knowing you're happy when you're happy, and being in the moment. It's very Zen, really, the whole message in that song."
• "The guys in the song are just a couple of loser guys. You know, average Joes, who maybe know something that those of us who spend too much time in our heads don't know. But the bartender's the one who's really on the ball. The bartender's actually The One. The guys, they're just shootin' the bull. The bartender, he's the one. He's the Dalai Lama."
• Peters says that since the bartender in the song's name is Sam, she thinks it would have been great if they'd gotten Ted Danson, who played bartender Sam Malone on the sitcom Cheers, to appear as the bartender in the Faith Hill video.
• The song is part of Faith Hill's third album, Faith, best known for the songs "This Kiss" and "Let Me Let Go."