The Hidden Cost of Desire: Why Chaos is Essential for Entrepreneurial Success If you have no desire, it doesn't matter what your reality is, you have no enthusiasm because there's no potential. And so we feed off of potential and we feed off of potential converting into reality. That's what we call clinically progress. Something existed in my head that now exists in my worlds. Therefore, I'm making progress. You can hack this, by the way. What if you could build a business in the modern world as big or as small as you want without having to compromise the things that were the most important to you in the very beginning? This is the Wealthy Consultant Talks podcast with Taylor Welch and Mike Walker as they share with you today, their learning lessons from stories in their experiences over the past 10 to 15 years, and share with you right here. Right now, let's get into it. Today, I thought we, what we would talk about for a little bit, I am, uh, I'm pretty deep into, I'm, I'm gonna finish my next book probably in the next 10 days. It's almost done. It's on the currency, the currency of the Third Heaven. How do you, how do you. Run in such a way where you are trusted with control and then, but I've so got so much research around the entrepreneurial psychology, so I want these calls to be, uh, sustenance for you as you go build movements. In fact, one of my new topics, I'm speaking in April, I have one week in April with five events in the week of April, and they're all brand new topics, so it's different. If I'm just going to speak on something that I've spoken about a lot before, but when things are brand new, puts a lot of weight on making sure that I know how to teach it. And one of them is how to, how to make and manage movements. That's gonna be really good. That's Steph Wagner's event. She's a OG chamber client. Wow, that's gonna be cool here in Nashville. But, um, what I'm thinking about today is the balance between desire. What desire means is when you want something, you have a, a desire or a a goal. You want it. Not all desire is good desire. First of all, we can have addiction, which would be a desire that is compulsive, so we have difficulty controlling it. This is a problem with a lot of entrepreneurs today. In fact, if you look at what they really crave, they create, they create status and notoriety and, uh, things that are not inherently bad. But because they're com. Impulsive in their addiction for it, they become bad. So anything that you crave that you're not in control of, the craving is going to be negative. But then a lot of desire is really good and really healthy. So, but there's a balancing act between desire and chaos. Chaos is the soil for converting potential things that we want into reality, things that we have. And the number one reason for unhappiness, especially today, the year 2025, where we have technological connection to people all across the world. The number one reason for unhappiness is because we desire things that we do not have. And so you have popular success psychologists who have come on the scene, who have made it a thousand times worse by saying, look, just lower your expectations. Just don't desire anything. Therefore, you can't be unhappy. And it's a bit like the, if a functional, um, therapeutic eastern medicine person came on the scene and they were like, look, there's so much bad things in food, so just don't ever eat again. We would know that there's something wrong with that person. Nobody would follow that advice. You would die without food. Similarly, the human psyche dies without desire. We can't function without it. Evolution is programmed us to have desire, and so you can't just lower your expectations across the board without slowly running out of fuel and running out of energy. But like most things, the, the, the ingredients that make a human. Poised, happy, successful if the, if the ingredients get out of balance, they can make a human unfit. Unhappy, unsuccessful. You take, like my wife and I are doing this diet thing right now. I've literally got a bowl full of papaya in front of me. I have to eat As soon as this meeting is is over, we're eating like papaya and kiwis and steak and chicken. No sugar, no dairy. I lost six pounds last week. Mike. Six. Geez, dude. Like a pound. That's the fastest I've ever lost weight before and I'm not, I don't really care about losing weight per se. Yeah. I just want to like, you know, be healthy and live forever. And that's still doing gym and everything, huh? Huh? Yeah, I still doing gym, working out, doing, yeah. And eating a lot of food, like 3500, 3800 calories a day. And lose loss to lose six pounds in a week. For me, eating like almost 4,000 calories a day is, is crazy. It's, but. But we're starting to pay attention for the first time really, to like, what's in a recipe, what's going on with the recipe? Because if there's something in the recipe that's got, you know, uh, dairy in it, or it's got too much sodium in it, we can't use it. But I'm surprised that if a recipe calls for, um, you know, a certain thing and you just delete that certain thing, it doesn't taste very good. Mm. I'm surprised by that because I've never been like a cook, but in life you have the same thing, and it makes so much sense. If you have, if you have too much desire and not enough reality, then the whole cake gets messed up and then we're unhappy. If you have no desire, it doesn't matter what your reality is, you have no enthusiasm because there's no potential. And so we feed off of potential and we feed off of potential converting into reality. That's what we call clinically. Progress. What does it mean when potential is converted into reality? It's called progress. It's literally what it means. Something existed in my head that now exists in my worlds, therefore I'm making progress. You can hack this by the way. You can legitimately hack it by, uh. Fractionalizing success down to a micro dose. So if, if you're feeling like you're in a place where you're just not, you don't have a lot of drive, usually drive meek, but barring the hormonal, biological reasons that drive could be low, you can actually look at the lack of progress as a limiter for human drive. When we work too long with not enough perceived progress, our drive goes into the gutter. And so, uh, an easy way that we, we can hack this and sometimes I do, is I will just set a very basic, easy goal for me to actualize. So it could be waking up 30 minutes earlier every day. It doesn't mean anything. There's no extra money that's getting deposited into my account because I wake up 30 minutes earlier. But something about. Me setting something imaginary that turns into something real gets my drive back up. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. So it doesn't have to be big. We're sometimes we swing for the fences and we're like, yo, look. Just like I. Get a base hit every once in a while, like get, get a base hit and then then go forward and be happy. Like just, we have to fix our enthusiasm. And I think I shared this a couple weeks ago. If you wanna look at the barometer on a civilization and you want to decide whether this civilization is going to die or survive, rate the aggregate enthusiasm in the population. That's it. When a civilization loses enthusiasm, they go backwards and people, I don't mean this can't be, you can't politicize this. People stop having kids. They, they stop trying. We like pivot to socialism and communism has to take over. But when a civilization has enthusiasm, people work, they produce, they perpetuate. They multiply, and as we look at our lives as entrepreneurs or as leaders, as people who wanna accomplish big things in our lives, we have to understand the cost that must be paid for a desire to be realized. So we get all excited when we sit down at the beginning of the year. We set new goals or we set goals for the quarter and it, and it does something to our, to our neurochemistry. It's called dopamine. We get dopamine, it floods the brain in. We're really, really, really excited. Anybody sat down and just thought about your future and, uh, you are feeling pretty bad, but now you're feeling pretty good. Yeah, all, all the time For me. Morning formula, baby Morning formula. This is a dopamine hack. You, you're just getting more dopamine. So when we think about a future that's better than our present. We get dopamine. 'cause dopamine is what kind of comes in and it makes us really excited to, um, to go do the work. And so we've taught about dopamine, but because sometimes we fail to count the cost, we get stuck in the middle. This chasm, and we don't have enough requisite drive because we didn't count the cost. And this is where we're gonna probably talk and hang out for a little bit today. The, the currency necessary to turn something that is imaginary and something that is exciting into something that is real. The cost that you have to pay for this is, is the, the chaos in the middle. Chaos where you feel a little bit outta control. You feel like you don't exactly know what's going on. Has anybody been in a season of your life where it's just marked by chaos? Yeah. There, I've had a few chapters, yeah. And it's just like, yo, what the hell is going on? I can't keep up with it. I don't know what's going on with this person, that person, and Isaac, you can tell that you're in chaos. Really? You can tell because you feel like your control meter has been pushed all the way to zero. I can't control it. I'm losing the ability to control myself. I'm going crazy. There's so much stuff happening, and, uh, chaos is, is a beautiful thing because chaos in indicates that you are in the middle. And everyone like wants to hate on the, Jennifer Blim said it earlier, you know, the messy middle. And people like to talk about the messy middle all the time. But when we're in the middle of the messy middle, no pun intended, I. We, we think there's something wrong with us, rather than remembering that this is just the price of making it through to the other side. My wife and I are going to Gatlinburg here in a couple weeks. We're gonna take like three or four days off, just like sit and read and sleep. It's gonna be amazing. We're leaving the kids with grandparents in Nashville, so we're gonna like sleep till we wake up, which for me will probably be like seven. My wife will wake up at like five 'cause she's just so used to waking up. But. The point is when we're in the middle of our trip to Gatlinburg, uh, how weird would it be for us to be like, yo, we're in the middle of nowhere. We are freaking screwed. We can't go back to Nashville. We're not in Gatlinburg. Just give up. Just give up. We have to basically get outta this truck and just sit here. Just plant down. Yeah. It's so silly, but that's what we do in life. We're like, this isn't working. I set a goal to get to Gatlinburg. I'm not in Gatlinburg, but I'm also not home. Nothing looks familiar. Nothing feels familiar, and I'm screwed, so I've gotta quit. Yeah, just gonna slow up. It's what we do with the messy middle in life. We just freaking sit down and stop going. Or lemme give you a different analogy. How? How equally weird would it be? Two hours outta Nashville, about an hour and a half away from Gatlinburg. I don't recognize anything. I've never been on this road before. Lindsay, something is wrong with me. Something's wrong with me. I caused this. I must have created this. I don't, I don't know how to do anything about it. And the, and I'm so, so insecure all of a sudden because I don't recognize where I am. That's what we do as well. We're like, we think this, we have personally penalized ourselves. Because we're in the middle of something and we don't know how to get to the other side, and we're comparing ourselves on social media to somebody who's already in Gatlinburg and we're like, well, they must have made it be because they're better than I am and I can't make it because I don't recognize this. It's so stupid because everyone's kinda like this analogy where like, this is like a junior high analogy, but this is what we do in life. Yeah, no, it still is. Like my VSLs not working. My social media is not working. My sales aren't working, and it's working for Taylor, and therefore Taylor must be good and I must be bad. No, you're just in the middle. You're on a road trip, you're in the middle. Chaos is just the price that must be paid. We gotta pay the price of chaos a little bit. And like all things in the spirit, like all things in the quantum realm, if you wanna call it and tap it into energy. There is a different level of commitment for you to make it through the other side when you're at the third heaven than when you're at the first heaven. If you go into a store and you're picking out some groceries and you pay for the groceries and that person doesn't give you the groceries, we're we're gonna be upset with that person. We paid for the groceries. There are groceries we're gonna have, it's gonna be a mess. Imagine if you went into the grocery store. If you pay for the groceries and the person checking you out looked at Mike. Mike just paid for it with his Amex platinum 'cause he is loaded. And as she said before, you take these groceries proof to me that you want them. Mike, what would you do? Start being right there. I want him right now, rub his tummy. But this is what happens in our, in our, in the, in the energetic rum. Prove, prove it. Prove it, prove it. Prove that you want this, that you're paying the cost, but prove that you want it. Prove that you're in it. Prove that you're not going back home without these. This is why in the Bible says, um, if you have no doubts, when you pray and you expect that you're going to get them, it, it gives this indication, especially when you look into the Greek of this, uh, the, I like to study the, the original language. It gives this idea that when when you go for something and you have two options presented in front of, in front of you, you either get the thing that you wanted or you die. That's how intense the level of desire is for it. Then you. Not until, yeah, you gotta have the staying power in the middle to prove that you're not just in this transactionally to show someone else that you deserve it. You're in this because you are born to have this. And to the extent that you are willing to sacrifice for it and stay on the road, life will begin to organize around you. Does it make sense? We good? Wanna keep going? Tracking. Keep going. There's a, there's this, there's this, this specific type of chaos that I wanna talk about real fast, which is the chaos of when things begin to work. And so, I don't know where everyone is on this call, but, um, for most of us, there's different levels of chaos. There's like level one chaos, which is what what's required for you to step out of the comfortable into going for something. And people really wrestle with this too. This isn't. It's not like level one is easy, level two is more difficult. Level three is really hard. This is, this is a linear, this is more of a GPS type levels. Not an, an importance of, of hierarchy. Okay. Level one is like, you have to, you have to kind of convince yourself that it's worth it to even try. This is like your, your Frodo, Frodo Baggins. Running out of the Shire and Sam Wise, Gaji stops behind you. And I don't know if you guys have seen this movie or not, but it's awesome. I've read, read the books when I was a kid and watched the movies and Sam Wise says something, he is like, if another step and I'll be the furthest that I've ever been away from home. And he stops 'cause he recognizes the weight of the moment. If I do this, I'll be the furthest I've ever been from comfort. Security, safety and protection. And it's a moment. They have a moment in the middle of this movie where they're like, let, we gotta keep going. Everyone hits level one. Anytime you set a big target, it's not right away, but as soon as you begin, you'll be hit with this first level of chaos, which is the mental dysfunction of realizing that if you do this, you might never be the same. And are you okay with that? And 90% of the world is not okay with it, which is why they work the same gigs and they do the same things for 60 years. Yeah. And they regret it. When you get to the end of their lives, they usually regret this. Then you have like level two chaos. Level two chaos is just the, the, the season of your life that you go through that's marked by confusion. And with confusion always comes frustration. So these are the people who are frustrated because they don't really know where they are anymore. So you're like a year into this, eight months into this thing, and it was working. You have just enough proof that you can do it. You're not to your goals, so you're just in the middle and you're kind of looking around and you don't recognize your surroundings. Your friends are typically changing or different, and when you wake up in the morning and you go to bed at night, you're not a hundred percent certain on who you are anymore. This is uncomfortable. This is level two chaos, and this chaos is typically not a mark of the minds. This typical, typical, typically is a mark of your identity. You. You're like, who am I? And why am I doing this? You've typically forgotten why you started. Yeah. You're like, uh, what am I doing here? Like, why did I even do this? Yeah. My life was pretty good before, kinda lost the plot a little bit. Hey, here's the dangers. People sometimes turn around and go right back. Yeah, because they can't make it through this chaos of like being confused in the middle. So they go back and then they start over. The problem I have with level two is, is because it is really if, if you're gonna go through a two year sprints and you make it a year in, you've paid a full year, you have paid through frustration, confusion, doubts. And then you're just gonna turn right back around and give that all back. You paid for nothing. Yeah. So this, that's the danger, right? Careful here. Yeah. Be careful at level two. Yeah. Something happens from level two to level three, and when you get to level three, you're typically right before you get to this place that you set out. To get to in the beginning, and this, this level three chaos is typically marked by you realizing that you're close and being unwilling to let go and fatigue sets in. Mm-hmm. So your identity is no longer in flux. You know who you are and you're like, I don't even care. I'm getting this prize. But you begin running this mental computation and mental calculation on like, do I have enough energy to hang on until I get to the other side? And so when you are like fatigued and you're almost emotionally tired and you're just like, I don't know if I have enough energy to survive, you're level three. This is the chaos of level of level three. When, um, you can see this in the story of the Israelites too. Every story you can see in the story of the Israelites, you can see this like really special dysfunctional group of people and then like, you know, level one, they had to be convinced to just leave Egypt. First of all. Like, why would you have to be convinced to leave slavery? Sometimes we'll talk to people who are new clients and we're like. They start wondering if they even want to win, and it's like, why would you need to be convinced that you want to win? Well, it's because it's, they've been programmed for so long that like winning is dangerous and I don't know what it feels like and I don't know who I am. And so they've to be convinced to leave Egypt and then they're in the middle, they're the middle of the desert, and they're just like, yo, we don't even know what's going on. It would've been better for us to just like stay in Egypt because there was food, but the food was shit. But they're craving it because they don't know where anything's coming from. They're completely, they've lost track of their identity. And then you see them on the, the third step and they get to back to the, to the, to the promised lands. And there's a guy who comes up through the ranks of Israel. His name is Caleb. Interesting thing about Caleb is, is, this is in the Bible, but it's a historical story. Caleb wasn't even like born into the tribe of Israel. He was an outsider. He didn't even belong. He was actually a, a, a descendant of Esau. Caleb shouldn't have been an Israelite, but they sort of grafted him in. They think he was maybe married in, and Caleb is the outsider who is the one who goes and cleans up the, the, the Anais who are all the giants in the land. And he is 85 years old. Who on this call is 85 years old? I know you make fun of my age, Taylor, but it's definitely not 85. Right? So he is 85 and he goes and starts picking fights with Giants as an 85 years old. He, he, he's getting tired. He is gotta learn how to use resources right. And use people differently. And, and so these are the 1, 2, 3, but he ul it ultimately ends up hanging on. And he ends up getting this, this plot of land that, that turns into a really significant piece of land in Israel for the, the people and, yeah, that's exactly right. Caleb, like art gets into like, basically, uh, he's, he, they forget about Caleb and Caleb reminds Joshua that this was promised to me. He is like, I'm just as strong as when I was 40 years ago. And so you can tell his mindset's tuned a little bit different. Um, and there's an interesting thing we can go off on on Caleb. We probably won't talk all about it now, but, but when you feel like you're sort of, you don't belong, has anybody ever felt like they don't fit in? Like, I don't fully fit into my friend group. I don't really fit into like, you know, what's I'm, I'm kind of like years ago we had this business that was literally called the Outsider Circle, and it was because I always been an outsider my whole life, my entire life I've been an outsider. It is not been until recently that like I've become friends with people who were like in the crew, like, you know, Dan Martel and Russell Brunson and these guys. Um, I've always been on the outside and so it was like, I kind of like being on the outside. I think there's something special to be on the outside. I like Caleb. Caleb was not an insider. He was an outsider, and because of that, his, his brain thought different. He had different strategies and. A mark of being on the outside is endurance. Mm-hmm. A mark of being an outsider is that the things that make an insider tighter, don't, don't, don't make you tired anymore. The things that would cause somebody to give up don't make you give up. You're, you're just built from a different type of blood. And so I was like, let's build a business to gather all these outsiders together and teach 'em how to win. And that has nothing to do with, with what we're talking about today. The, the third thing is fatigue and typically fatigue sets in because the progress that you're experiencing is met with equal resistance. And so if you ever had a, a, a couple of things in your life that start to work, and as soon as they start to work, they start causing more problems for you. And like you get this deal and then the deal does is exhausting and you're like, I wish I wouldn't have even gotten the deal. Then you like move to this city, you love it, but it's causing dysfunction and chaos. And I think probably 15 to 20% of this call right now is probably at that level three. And the problems are actually indicators that you are, you are creating waves and there's resistance against those waves. So we have to, to teach ourselves how to think through level three. We have to teach ourselves how to be through level two, and we have to teach ourselves how to design in level one. In level one chaos. We have to teach ourselves to design. Where are we going and why are we going? If you have a set of goals and you don't know why, you're not gonna make it through. Don't even start. If you've designed what you need to do, but you haven't designed what it needs to feel like, you're not gonna make it through. If you know that you want a lot of money, but you don't know how that's gonna impact your kids, don't even do it. Give up. It would be better for you to just wait and figure it out. Then in level two, we have to design identity. We're becoming somebody new, so who are we supposed to be? I. What, what things, what values fit into the new person that we're going to become on the other side. And then level three, we have to teach ourselves how to think. The Bible says God spoke to, to, to, uh, this is an Isaiah guy said, come let us reason together. A lot of people get all weird and they're like, well, who am I to argue with? God? You're pretty important. So you can argue with God if you want to, because. Is to partner. Uh, Fred's got six kids. His kids grow up and, and his one job is to transition from parenthood to partnership. That's his job as with his kids. So we are with God, we have to learn how to reason. How to think through what we believe, why we believe it, and reason with divinity sometimes so that we can partner in with it. Make sense? You good? Love it, man. Yeah. Couple, couple takeaways real fast, some questions. Uh, number one, chaos is the, is so is the soil that converts potential into reality. That's what chaos is. Don't hate on it. Fix your adversarial view of chaos. If you look at chaos as, as poison, it's going to poison you. If you look at it as, as alchemy, you're gonna use it to alchemize situations. Whatever you look at something, make sure you're looking at it in the way that you want it to be, not the way that it is, but the way you want it to be. Number two, faith. Faith. Now I'm not even talking about religious faith, I'm just talking about the belief system. Faith makes us comfortable with the chaos. And number three, we get to choose our reality. If we don't choose it, someone else or something else will choose it for us, and then it is random. Sometimes it'll work, sometimes it won't. So we sit down and we choose our reality. You might be leveling up, and if someone levels up really quickly, like if somebody hops into chamber. Or somebody's around us or somebody like if, if you come to like an event with, with me, you're on a level up. A lot faster mentally, and this has problems attached to it. Anytime you take a 10 year journey and compress it into a year, only an idiot would say that has no problems. Like there's problems with that. Like there, there's, there's some consequences that we have to look at. And I think the consequences of that are better than the consequences of taking 20 years for something that should take two. But that doesn't mean there are no consequences. And so sometimes what'll happen, and, and Alexis, me and Alexis, we know each other really well. And so like, there will be times where your, you're, you're moving so quickly. That you'll skip over a level two and you'll just be a level three, and then you'll sort of mentally subconsciously recalibrate. And you gotta go back and fix level two and make sure your identity is, is supportive of where you're going. You increase your, your, uh, energy capacity the same way you increase your mu musculature capacity. So how do you build capacity and your biceps. Hmm mm-hmm. Same thing spiritually. Yeah. Same thing with en energy. Um, it ain't comfortable, but it is. It is the, it is the, um, it's the duration. When the duration goes beyond your previous capacity, it just automatically expand. You ain't gonna break. You might crack a little bit, but you're not gonna break. It's just gonna, it is gonna morph up to catch it. Yeah. Cool. Alright guys. Love you all. See you next week. Let's get it. See you all. Have a good week. Let's go guys. Have a great week.