Build What You Want
What changes when you stop negotiating with your ambitions and start building from them.
In business, most of us spend an extraordinary amount of time solving problems—putting out fires, optimizing systems, managing what’s urgent, and trying to keep pace with the demands of the day. We pride ourselves on being adaptable, resourceful, and capable of doing what needs to be done. Yet for all that activity, it’s surprisingly rare for leaders to pause long enough to ask a far more essential question: What do I actually want?
It sounds simple, but in practice, it’s one of the hardest questions in business. Not what your industry expects, not what your peers value, not what’s practical, polite, or easy to defend. But what you actually want. Free of justification. Free of apology. Free of borrowed expectations. Most goals aren’t shaped by authentic desire—they’re shaped by pressure, habit, and the momentum of whatever came before.
When what we want is unclear, our work becomes reactive. We end up managing today rather than building tomorrow. Urgency becomes a stand-in for direction. Everything feels important because nothing has been defined. Instead of advancing a vision, we maintain a cycle: responding, fixing, adjusting, and keeping things afloat. It’s busy, but it’s not the kind of busy that creates breakthroughs in our work — or more importantly, in ourselves.
That’s why it matters to know what you want. Clarity transforms the entire system around you. It sharpens priorities. It filters opportunities. It strengthens boundaries. It makes decision-making faster because you understand what each option supports—or doesn’t. Without clarity, we chase whatever appears. With clarity, we choose intentionally. And it’s that shift—from reacting to selecting—that separates incremental progress from meaningful forward movement.
Leaders who operate from genuine desire tend to move differently. They’re not motivated by comparison or approval; they’re motivated by purpose. They don’t require perfect conditions to act; they simply need alignment. And they don’t wait for consensus before pursuing the next step. They’ve already decided where they’re going, and the work is shaped around that decision.
Few people articulate this tension—the space between living by obligation and leading by desire—better than this week’s guest, Eggs! The Podcast guest and inspiration for The Mindset Movement Fieldguide, David Neagle. Neagle, a speaker, entrepreneur, and best-selling author of The Millions Within, has spent decades helping people uncover what they truly want and understand how that clarity becomes the catalyst for real change.
Perspective on Desire and Direction
David Neagle is a speaker, coach, and author of The Millions Within, and the founder of Life Is Now, Inc., a global consulting company that has helped thousands of entrepreneurs and professionals rethink what they’re capable of creating. For more than two decades, he has worked at the intersection of mindset, performance, and personal agency—guiding people to break out of inherited limitations and build businesses that reflect their actual ambitions rather than their obligations.
Neagle is widely recognized for his contributions to the personal development field, having collaborated with influential teachers and mentored high-profile leaders across a range of industries. His long-running podcast, The Successful Mind, examines how internal beliefs shape external results, offering a practical framework for leaders who want their decisions and outcomes to come from clarity rather than reaction.
What makes Neagle especially relevant to this discussion is his insistence that meaningful progress begins with an honest appraisal of desire. He challenges people to articulate what they want without apology, to examine the beliefs that limit those wants, and to bring their work into alignment with a direction they’ve chosen consciously. In a culture that rewards speed and productivity, Neagle’s lens offers a useful counterbalance: before you build, decide what you’re building for.
What Desire Can Teach Us About Leadership
You can’t lead effectively if you don’t know where you’re going. And you can’t know where you’re going until you’re honest about what you want. Desire isn’t indulgence—it’s orientation. When you take it seriously, it becomes the quiet architecture behind every meaningful decision you make.
“When you think you have a money problem, you’re looking in the wrong direction. Money’s an effect, not a cause.”
Insight: Leaders often misdiagnose constraints. If you’re focused on revenue gaps, pricing, or cash flow but not examining the assumptions driving your decisions, you’re solving symptoms—not sources. Before you adjust strategy, ask what belief, fear, or expectation is producing the current result.
“The number one question you need to ask yourself is: What do you really want? And you have to determine what you want without any kind of justification.”
Insight: Clarity isn’t about what’s responsible, reasonable, or defendable—it’s about what is true. Articulate your desires without filtering them through practicality. Strategy becomes dramatically simpler when desire—not pressure—defines your direction.
“We’re programmed to be problem-first thinkers. As long as your subconscious keeps focusing on problems you can fix, you’re not charting the course for your own life.”
Insight: Many entrepreneurs are exceptional firefighters but ineffective visionaries. Build time each week for direction-setting rather than issue-solving. If you don’t intentionally choose a direction, your problems will choose your direction for you.
“Just because you agree with something doesn’t mean you believe it. Belief is when your thinking, your emotions, and your actions are all in integrity with each other.”
Insight: Alignment—not inspiration—is what creates results. If your behavior contradicts what you claim to believe, examine the emotional or practical friction underneath. Real belief doesn’t require force; it produces consistent action without inner conflict.
“Most people back out of their own dream because someone in their life disagrees with it. Instead of walking away from the person, they quit on the dream.”
Insight: External disapproval is one of the most powerful internal limiters. Protect your goals from the gravitational pull of other people’s fears, preferences, or expectations. The dream is yours; the resistance belongs to someone else.
“If you want something, you can want it for no other reason than that you want it.”
Insight: Desire doesn’t need moral permission or strategic explanation. Let your goals be ambitions, not apologies. The willingness to want freely is often the first break in an inherited pattern.
Closing the Distance
Desire is easy to overlook. It feels private, personal, even impractical—something we’ll get to once the urgent things are out of the way. But as David Neagle reminds us, desire is the starting point. It’s what gives shape to our decisions, boundaries to our commitments, and coherence to our work. When we ignore what we want, we don’t become more responsible—we become less directed. Leadership without desire isn’t leadership at all; it’s maintenance.
Neagle’s perspective is a reminder that clarity isn’t found in spreadsheets or strategies. It emerges when we’re willing to name what we’re after without apology. That single act—simple, uncomfortable, and deeply clarifying—is what turns intention into movement. It’s what transforms problem-solving into progress. The leaders who grow are the ones who stop negotiating with their wants and start building from them.
In a world that rewards speed and punishes stillness, desire is not indulgence—it’s discipline. It asks us to tell the truth about what would make our work meaningful, not just manageable. And when we do, the gap between where we are and where we hope to be begins to shrink. Because breakthroughs rarely start with effort. They start with wanting something enough to move toward it.
Thanks for reading,
—Ryan
If you’re ready for life to feel more intentional, more aligned, and more within your control, this guide gives you the structure to make that shift real. Your next version starts with a single decision. Get the field guide
Ready for more?
Catch David Neagle’s interview in its entirety on Eggs! The Podcast.
Don’t miss a show! Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or really anywhere great podcasts are found.
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Reading list
If you're looking to go deeper on the themes from this week's newsletter, here are a few books that pair well with the conversation and offer a broader perspective:
1. The Millions Within — David Neagle The foundation for this week’s conversation — and the entire Mindset Movement essay series and book. Neagle explores how desire, decision, and belief converge to shape the results we create. If you want a clearer understanding of how internal structure influences external success, this is the place to begin.
2. Think and Grow Rich — Napoleon Hill Referenced throughout the conversation, Hill’s classic is less about money and more about clarity, desire, and disciplined thought. It’s the origin point for many of the principles Neagle teaches, including the importance of knowing what you truly want and pursuing it with conviction.
3. God Works Through Faith — Robert A. Russell Neagle name-checks this book directly when discussing the mechanics of belief and how faith translates into action. Despite the title, it’s fundamentally about the structure of certainty—how conviction creates momentum and how clarity becomes a catalyst for outcomes.
4. The War of Art — Steven Pressfield A powerful companion to this week’s theme. Pressfield’s exploration of resistance, fear, and the internal forces that keep us from pursuing our true work pairs naturally with Neagle’s insistence on naming what you actually want. It’s a sharp, practical guide for moving from intention to execution.
5. Essentialism — Greg McKeown When Neagle talks about trading reactivity for intentionality, the principle he’s pointing to is essentialism: deciding what matters, eliminating what doesn’t, and acting in alignment with a clear direction. McKeown’s book is a modern framework for leaders who want to build around purpose rather than urgency.
More to explore
The Millions Within - Get the Book!
Life is Now, Inc. - Neagle’s Global Consultancy
The Successful Mind - Neagle’s Podcast
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