Touch Your Dreams
Go taste the life you want so you become familiar enough to move toward it.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Because you drift toward whatever is most familiar, staying inside your current life keeps you stuck. Mylett's fix is to periodically go touch the dream — get the cheapest room at the luxury hotel, valet the car, experience the life for a day. Repeated every few weeks, the unfamiliar becomes familiar: the valet, the oceanfront, the golf course all start to feel like places you belong. That growing sense of belonging pulls you toward the dream and shifts your identity from outsider to rightful owner of that life.
Origin
As an up-and-comer Mylett set self-contests — if he hit his sales numbers he'd take $500 and spend a night at the Ritz-Carlton in the cheapest room — to periodically touch the dream until he felt he belonged in it.
Core principles
- 01You move toward what you're most familiar with.
- 02Periodically experiencing your dream makes it familiar and reachable.
- 03Small affordable tastes of the dream reprogram your sense of belonging.
- 04Over repeated exposure you stop feeling like a visitor and start feeling you belong.
How to run it
- 1
Pick a tangible taste
Choose an affordable slice of your dream life you can physically experience, like one night at a luxury resort.
- 2
Earn it with a self-contest
Tie the taste to a performance target you set for yourself and only claim it if you hit the target.
Pro tip Mylett's rule: if he didn't hit the number, he didn't get the reward.
- 3
Experience it fully as if you belong
Show up and live it completely — valet the car, take the massage, act like it's normal for you.
- 4
Repeat until familiar
Return every several weeks so the dream shifts from unfamiliar to familiar to a place you belong.
In the wild
When making eight grand a month, Mylett would take $500 and book the cheapest room at the Ritz-Carlton, valet the car, and live the day as a big shot.
→ Over repeated visits the luxury became familiar and he began to feel he belonged, later coming to actually live that life.
He'd walk the beach as a kid telling his wife he'd get a house there someday, with no idea how.
→ He now literally lives on that beach on a hundred-acre island.
Common mistakes
Only visualizing, never experiencing
Keeping the dream purely mental leaves it unfamiliar, so you keep drifting back to your current life.
Taking the taste without earning it
Divorcing the reward from a self-set contest turns discipline into indulgence and undermines the growth.
Is it for you?
Best for
Up-and-comers who want to make an ambitious future feel real and inevitable.
Not ideal for
People who would use it to overspend rather than earn small, disciplined tastes.
From the transcript
“you should touch your dreams and the reason is you belong in them but you move towards what you're most familiar with in your life”
“over time i'm like i'm kind of familiar with the valet i'm kind of familiar with the oceanfront ... i'm like we belong here”
From the episode
YAPClassic: Ed Mylett on The Power of One More, How to Reprogram Your Mind to Get What You Want
YAPClassic