Changing Your Outlook Changes Everything

One of the funny parts about letting go of your childhood is learning the small lessons you managed to keep.

I don’t know how old I was when my dad first dropped his favorite pearl of wisdom. I don’t remember why he said it. But I can still hear the phrase in my mind, spoken in Dad’s playful intonation, as if to emphasize its inherent truth. I suspect I always will.

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

It took me a while to realise the meaning of those words, and even longer to realize they referred to me. But the answer arrived when I was least expecting it: On a golf course headed in the wrong direction.

I realized my perspective was changing as my rental car tore down the highway somewhere in northern michigan on the evening after my 28th birthday. The emotion wasn’t quite melancholy or wistfulness – but something deeper: I was confronting the strangeness of aging for the first time.

At twenty-eight, I wasn’t old. More importantly, I didn’t feel old. In fact, I felt precisely the same age as when I’d graduated from college in 2019 – still doe-eyed and green and hungry. But then I looked at the calendar and realized the Syracuse University class of 2025 had just graduated ten years after my arrival on campus. I was as close to the class of 2025 as the class of 2013 was to me … which is to say: I was ancient.

I spent a few minutes in a spiral, grappling with the sinking feeling that I’d fallen behind. I was 28 and young. But my chance to achieve real relevance at a young age, to become the whiz kid I’d always imagined myself becoming, was fleeting. If I blinked, I’d be 30 and washed. And then what? Settle into life as a writer of minimal influence? Become a jilted golf media curmudgeon? Continue to suck at golf? Move to the suburbs? sheet metal.

It didn’t help that I was in Michigan on a golf trip that was supposed to bring back the glory days. For months, my college buddies had dreamt of this long weekend in Northern Michigan as a long-overdue reunion – a bootstrapped golf trip through god’s country as a conven