9 Steps to Build a Life of Meaning by Rick Walker

How to Unlock Your Mind, Happiness, Power, and Your Enemy's Demise

Make Sense of the Chaos. This Is Your Map to Relevance.

What You’ll Gain After 9 Days:

1. Morning Mastery – Jumpstart your day with rituals that sharpen clarity.
2. Mental Fortitude – Transform stress into fuel through proven resilience tools and downloadable bonus PDFs.
3. Intentional Leadership – Find, build, then lead your family and team from conviction, not compulsion.
4. Meaning-Centered Identity – Align your work and relationships to compound power.
5. Strategic Relevancy Design – Build a story that echoes long after you’re gone.

Stop chasing vague happiness and start pursuing unshakable relevance. 9 Steps to Build a Life of Meaning gives you the mental map you've been missing — a bold guide through the fog of distraction, weakness, and regret.

Built for men who want more than motivation, this book fuses timeless wisdom, personal battle stories, and strategic insight into a blueprint for self-development and personal growth. If you're tired of reading self-help books for men that promise quick fixes but deliver nothing lasting, this book delivers something rare: transformation that sticks.

Think Clearly. Act Decisively. Build Relevance.

In a world where confusion is sold as freedom, Rick Walker brings clarity, focus, and fire. These 9 steps sharpen your decision making, amplify your influence, and cultivate an unstoppable mindset. Rooted in real-world leadership and Christian tradition, informed by Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu insight, each chapter is a weapon in the war for meaning.

What You’ll Experience After 9 Days:

1. Strategic Self-Improvement – Downloadable PDF bonus tools to grow fast, deep, and for good.
2. Powerful Mental Processes – Rewire habits, sharpen focus, master emotional control in 7 days.
3. Purpose-Driven Success – Apply ancient strategy and modern psychology to live on mission with 9 proven life operating principles.
4. Authentic Influence – Learn effective communication, persuasion, and self-presentation from a man who’s led teams across business, politics, and philanthropy.
5. Battle-Tested Tactics – Every story, every tool is forged in hardship—not theory.

A Book Built for Real Men to understand why a man must pick a worthy enemy, why attitudes determine outcomes, and how charismatic, influential leadership begins within.

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Excerpt from 9 Steps to Build a Life of Meaning © Copyright 2025 Rick Walker

STEP 1

CHOOSE ONE
WORTHY ENEMY.

If you don’t know what you want,
never start with a goal.
Start with an enemy.

THE SET-UP: MIAMI NIGHTS

The beheading DVD arrived days before I was to attend an invite-only event for future global leaders co-hosted by former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s Foundation. It was 2009, and for plausible deniability’s sake, let’s say I was NOT involved in a nonprofit’s PSYOP (psychological operation), which essentially “neutralized” a million enemy combatants.

But we threatened them with something worse than death.

Some of us quietly funded various philosophical, social, and faith efforts in countries north of the Sahel region of Africa. This region is quite strategic: easy access through Libya into Egypt, across the Sinai Peninsula through Saudi Arabia, and into Iraq and Syria.

The West had been in the throes of its war on terror. Some of us business people wanted to help. I had just turned thirty and raised $20 million over several years to infiltrate media, humanitarian aid, and religious organizations. I eventually became Chairman.

We introduced a variety of concepts that secularized certain key populations. If a dedicated adherent becomes a secular mercenary, his commitment to extremism wanes. He doesn’t have to deconvert. It’s the true believers who convince their own children to savagely blow themselves up. And that’s the part you’re not supposed to say.

The enemies of humanity FedEx’d us the day after leadership meetings in Niger and Mali. Playing the enclosed DVD, we saw our local leader wearing an orange jumpsuit. The masked cowards in all-black attempted to deconvert him from his apostasy.

Refusing, our colleague began to be beheaded on video. Not able to fully decapitate him, to saw. Vile creatures of evil hate.

Sweat dripping from my armpits down my sides—wondering if my family was safe—I watched the video in putrid horror as his neck bones ground against those bladed teeth. This was not the first killing. There had been 52 other team members murdered by that time—one for each week of the year. Evil has teeth. And it threatens to kill us all.

And the evils of the world became not only more real, but more proximate for me. Nameless and faceless, except for the smudged fingerprints all over the disc. The whiff of death was close enough to smell their sandy sweat on that envelope and I knew these far-away extremists on television now could enter our homes as they could ship bugs, poisons, explosives, or threats without a single person in-country. Terrorize without presence. They knew our names and addresses. The double oceans of American safety no longer protected any of us.

“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”
— Albert Einstein

The academic and business books written by forgettable men tell you to start with a goal. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t tell me about your goals, tell me about your enemies and the problems which break your heart.

Most men need worthy enemies more than they need friends.

That day, however, with evil’s threats now closer than ever, I felt an overwhelming desire for a truer good to guide my life. And to stand up to evil. If my shaking legs could.

Choose one worthy enemy.

I was invited to the global leadership event in South Florida because of my business background as a fairly successful young founder and because I was the person back then who did the type of charitable work that deconverted a million terrorists. It was odd that they found out about it since this is the first time I’ve ever really mentioned it publicly. But I showed up in Miami wrestling with the anxiety of my more exposed situation but also a strong sense of ego as I was being considered a leader of the future. My life felt like it was opening up. But suddenly much more vulnerable.

And my imposter syndrome was in full swing.

With that mindset, I dove into the serious work of the Miami event. We spent the week discussing how to save the planet, running on the beach, setting up b-corps (a hybrid between a business and a nonprofit), and planning how soon we could exit our current businesses at a time when purchases of tech companies were astronomical—often 50–80 × earnings. These exit scenarios were enough to ensure most of these 20-somethings never had to work again. I’d bet most of today’s billionaires under forty-five attended.

The evenings began with a three-hour dinner at a rented restaurant—lobsters, Wagyu, and celebrity chefs. Aged wines, bourbons, and Smirnoff.