What Changed When I Started Creating Costco Samples of My Dream Life

I’m walking my dogs through the neighborhood, cool winter air pulling in and out of my lungs. All around me, naked, leafless trees reach into a dove-gray sky. Browning lawns stretch from house to house, wildflowers and weeds put to bed for the winter.

I used to hate this.

I used to despise winter—the cold, the gray—with every ounce of my being.

And yet today, I’m beaming, feeling the chilled warmth of the sun as it slips through the clouds, briefly heating the skin of my face.

I’m grateful.

Truly grateful.

In fact, I’m nearly bursting with gratitude because I just completed my “gratefuls”—what I call my intentional walking gratitude practice.

And then I have one of those blissful, seemingly rare moments when I realize:

This is my dream life.

Maybe not the fully expressed version I envision—but a taste of it.
A true microcosm of what I desire.

I’m having these moments more and more.

Because I’ve realized something important:

I can craft these moments.

I call them the Costco samples of my dream life.

And you can create them too.

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Your POV Determines Your Experience of Life

Over the past year or so, I’ve learned a powerful lesson:

Everything—and I do mean everything—I experience in life happens through my POV, my point of view.

Our perceptions—the filters and lenses of our mindset—shape how we see and experience the world.

Which means we have tremendous power in shaping our lived experience.

Without even realizing it, we are constantly crafting our reality—filtering in and out the countless stimuli we encounter each day according to the lenses we’ve already set in place.

Our brains delete information that feels irrelevant, generalize massive amounts of data into manageable chunks, and distort sensory details to fit the narratives we’re already telling ourselves.

You may understand this on some level.

But here’s the part we often miss:

This process occurs through a filter we’ve consciously or unconsciously chosen for our lives—our narrative point of view.

For me, that narrative historically looked like this:

Everything I desire in life is missing.
There is something wrong with my life.
There is something wrong with me.
And I must fix it.

This filter created a suffocating, hypervigilant mind—one that constantly scanned for problems, obsessively noticed what was missing, and supplied a never-ending list of coulds, woulds, and shoulds in an attempt to construct the life I longed for.

Which meant that, without realizing it, I was placing fulfillment somewhere out there—in the future.
A destination always on the horizon.
Never arriving.

Over the past year, I’ve begun to shift this by getting clearer about what I truly want—my internal objects of desire (more on that in a future post)—and intentionally choosing to notice even the smallest glimmers of those desires already present in my life.

The Costco samples.

And here’s what I’ve noticed:

The more I do this, the more my default narrative point of view begins to change.

And the more my narrative point of view changes…

The more Costco samples I receive.

Not because they’re suddenly appearing out of nowhere.

But because I’m finally noticing what’s been there all along.

I used to hate winter.

I truly despised it.

And yet now, I love it.

Winter didn’t change.

It’s still gray and cold.

I changed.

I changed my narrative point of view—and suddenly I could see the stunning beauty of naked, leafless trees reaching into a dove-gray sky.

The wonder of a flock of birds swooping in perfect synchrony through the frigid air as they scan the barren land for frozen berries.

The pure joy of three red golden retrievers bounding through the snow or basking in the cold, their thick coats made for this exact season.

The beauty of winter was always there.

And likewise, the glimmers of your dream life already exist in yours.

But like any good author, you must craft the narrative filter through which you view the world.

Because when you change…

So does your life.

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Threshold is for those done waiting for their life to change.
For those ready to pick up the pen and begin authoring their next chapter.

The free tier opens the door.
The paid tier is where the work deepens.

Inside Threshold, story becomes a practice—one that shapes both the life you’re writing and the person you're becoming.

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