I used to look back on my childhood and long for the days of having no responsibility, of playing carelessly and not worrying about adult things. But when I think about it, being a kid wasn’t as carefree as my sense of nostalgia would have me believe. When I was a kid I was full of worries about the future: I was always terrified of what came next, whether it was increasing difficulty at school or increasing responsibility at home. My outlook on life was grounded in the belief that hardships lurked everywhere on the horizon, and that I should never trust happiness and good experiences because I needed to be ready for the potential bad experiences.

I don’t know if other people had this worldview when they were kids, but I do know that for most people, childhood has universally frightening aspects. As kids we are completely vulnerable to the world and helpless to make our own decisions. We don’t create our own experiences, because parents, teachers, caretakers, and other adults create it for us. Our lives are ruled by the structure that adults build for us, and we live by their rules and beliefs. Good and bad experiences seem to occur at random, as if they came out of nowhere, and the world is a mysterious and scary place.

Once we become adults, we are finally able to take charge of our own lives. It can be extremely challenging to learn to take care of ourselves, but the beauty of transforming from dependent children to independent adults is that we are actually in control of our lives. We are actually in control of our lives. This means that instead of things happening to us, we make things happen for ourselves. We go from being passive recipients of experiences created by other adults, to being active participants, creating our own life experiences. Being in control of our lives makes the world seems less random and makes that the ebbs and flows of life less terrifying and mysterious than they seemed when we were kids. Most importantly, controlling our own lives means that we are free to create our own perspectives on life apart from the adults who influenced us as kids.

Our unique perspectives and outlooks are as important in shaping our lives as the things we actively make happen. People who genuinely view life as stressful, difficult, and full of negativity will experience a lot of stress, difficulty, and negativity. Conversely, people who believe that life is exciting, rewarding, and overall positive will experience a lot of excitement, gratification, and positivity. It’s that simple—life is exactly what we believe it to be…what we truly believe becomes reality.

Another way of putting this is that what we “put out to the universe” is what we get back. If we emanate cynicism, we draw cynical people to us, overlook the positive and focus on the negative, and get trapped inside a spiral of self-fulfilling prophesies of negativity that propagates more cynicism. Thinking, feeling, and believing negativity draws negativity to us. Making the switch from a cynical, negative, hopeless perspective to an optimistic, positive, confident perspective is the number one best way for us to find true happiness, achieve goals, and fulfill our potential. Changing our perspectives takes some initial faith, and involves fooling our minds for a while into trusting positivity and optimism until it actually takes hold. After awhile we will start to notice more positive things and positive people being drawn to us.

As adults, we should not remain stuck in the helplessness and powerlessness that we felt as kids. We are like living magnets—we draw experiences and people to us, except that unlike magnets, we have a variety of charges to choose from and we can change them whenever we want. Our minds are powerful enough to make all things real, imagined, and emotional a reality, and it’s completely up to us to choose our realities.