One of the things my father used to say when I was growing up was that if you send positive vibes out into the universe, the universe sends them back. It was one of those ideas that simply existed in our household. I don’t remember the first time I heard it. It was just there, woven into conversations about life, luck, opportunities, and the importance of maintaining a positive outlook.

I know where the idea came from because he talked about it with me. My father was interested in psychology and often discussed concepts from Maxwell Maltz’s book Psycho-Cybernetics. Long before I ever studied neuroscience, positive psychology, creativity, or systems thinking, I was hearing conversations about self-image, expectation, and human potential around the kitchen table. As a child, I didn’t fully understand those discussions, but the ideas stuck with me.

My father’s interpretation of those concepts was very similar to what many people today would recognize as the Law of Attraction. He believed that expectation mattered. In fact, he often used an example that has stayed with me for decades. He would say that if you walked along the side of the road expecting to find a twenty-dollar bill, eventually you would. He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He genuinely believed that what you expected to find influenced what you found.

The funny thing is that it seemed to work for him often enough that I never completely dismissed the idea.

Even now, I find myself wondering what was actually happening in those moments.

Recently, I was listening to a webinar with Peter Sage when he made a distinction that immediately caught my attention. He suggested that what many people call the Law of Attraction might be better understood as the Law of Creation. The phrase lodged itself in my brain because it felt connected to conversations I had been having with myself for years.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become fascinated by ideas that sound a little magical on the surface but may have a scientific explanation underneath. Some people find that process disappointing. They want the mystery removed. They want a definitive answer. I’ve found that the opposite is true for me. The more I learn about the human brain, the more remarkable it becomes. Understanding how something works rarely diminishes my sense of wonder. More often, it deepens it.

When people talk about the Law of Attraction, the conversation often turns toward vibrations, frequencies, and energy. While I understand why those explanations resonate with people, my own mind tends to wander in a different direction. Rather than asking whether the universe is sending something to us, I find myself wondering how our expectations shape what we notice, how we behave, and ultimately what we create.

One of the most fascinating things neuroscience has revealed is that our brains are not passive observers of reality. Every second, we are receiving more information than we could ever consciously process. Our brains are constantly sorting, filtering, and prioritizing information based on what appears important. In many ways, our attention functions like a spotlight, illuminating certain things while leaving countless others in the shadows.

Most of us have experienced this phenomenon. You buy a particular model of car and suddenly you start seeing that car everywhere. The cars didn’t magically appear overnight. They were always there. Your brain simply began treating them as relevant information.

When I think about my father’s twenty-dollar bill example, I wonder if something similar was happening. If he walked down the road expecting to find money, his attention was primed to notice money. He may have spotted things that other people walked right past because his brain had been instructed that this information mattered.

From a neuroscience perspective, that explanation makes perfect sense.

Yet I don’t think that explanation diminishes the wisdom of the original idea. In fact, I think it makes it more interesting.

Whether my father found the twenty-dollar bill because the universe delivered it or because his brain noticed it, the outcome was the same. He found something that someone else might have missed. The older I get, the more I find myself questioning whether we sometimes spend too much time arguing about the explanation and not enough time paying attention to the observation itself.

For centuries, people have noticed that expectations influence outcomes. They have noticed that confidence opens doors. They have noticed that optimism creates opportunities. They have noticed that people who believe something is possible are often more likely to pursue it. Long before we had brain imaging technology, people were observing these patterns and trying to make sense of them.

Today, neuroscience gives us language for some of those observations. We know that expectations influence perception. We know that beliefs influence behavior. We know that attention shapes experience. We know that placebo effects can create measurable changes in the body. We know that self-image influences decision-making.

In many ways, science is not replacing the old observations. It is helping us understand why they work.

What I find particularly interesting is that Maxwell Maltz was writing decades before modern neuroscience had the tools to explain many of the things he observed. Maltz believed that our self-image functioned like a kind of guidance system. Change the self-image, and behavior often follows. Today, neuroscientists might talk about predictive processing, cognitive schemas, expectancy effects, selective attention, or neuroplasticity. The language has changed, but the observation feels remarkably similar.

This is one reason I have become increasingly interested in examining ideas that are often dismissed as “woo-woo.” Sometimes the explanation attached to an idea may be questionable, but the observation itself turns out to be surprisingly accurate. Human beings noticed patterns long before they understood the mechanisms behind them. People understood that stress affects health long before we understood cortisol. They understood that expectations influence outcomes long before neuroscience could observe the brain processes involved.

The Law of Attraction may be another example. Whether or not the universe is literally responding to our thoughts, there is substantial evidence that our expectations shape our perception of reality. They influence what we notice, what we ignore, what risks we take, and what opportunities we pursue. A person who expects possibility is likely to behave differently than a person who expects failure. Over time, those differences accumulate.

This is where Peter Sage’s idea of creation resonated with me. When I look back on the accomplishments I am most proud of, I cannot honestly say that I attracted them. I did not attract a doctorate. I spent years studying and writing. I did not attract opportunities to teach and speak. I developed expertise and kept showing up. I did not attract book contracts. I wrote proposals, revised manuscripts, and submitted my work.

Yet I also cannot completely separate those accomplishments from mindset. If I had believed those goals were impossible, I likely would never have taken the actions necessary to pursue them. My expectations influenced my attention. My attention influenced my actions. My actions influenced my outcomes.

That is why I find myself wondering if attraction and creation are not opposing ideas at all. Perhaps what we often call attraction is simply what creation looks like from the outside. We notice an opportunity. We take action. We persist through setbacks. We build skills and relationships. Years later, the result appears and feels almost magical.

The older I get, the more I realize that many of life’s most remarkable moments are not dramatic. They are often small and easy to overlook. A conversation introduces us to an idea that changes how we see the world. A book finds its way into our hands at exactly the right moment. A piece of advice heard in childhood suddenly makes sense decades later. We notice something that everyone else walked past. We connect dots that previously seemed unrelated. Looking back, these moments can feel almost magical, even though they emerged from ordinary circumstances.

My father’s twenty-dollar bill example has stayed with me all these years because, in some ways, it captures that idea perfectly. Whether he found the money because the universe delivered it or because he trained himself to notice what others missed is almost beside the point. The result was the same. He saw possibilities where other people saw an ordinary roadside.

Perhaps that is the real lesson hidden inside all of this.

Not that the universe is hiding rewards for those who think positive thoughts, but that our expectations help determine what we are capable of seeing. The opportunities, ideas, and possibilities may already be there. What changes is our ability to recognize them.

And sometimes, recognizing them changes everything.

What do you think? Do we attract our experiences, create them, or perhaps a little of both? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.