Latest / Pathological Positivity / Build a Life of Meaning – with Rick Walker – Episode #692
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- This is Live On Purpose Radio episode 692, Build a Life of Meaning with Rick Walker. Now is the only time to create and live the life you love. I'm doctor Paul Jenkins, the positivity psychologist. My job is to connect you to powerful positive psychology principles that immediately upgrade your relationships, business, and mental health. Are you ready? Let's jump in. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Live On Purpose Radio. This is doctor Paul the shrink who expands your life with another episode of Live on Purpose Radio. Joining me on the mic today is an author who just came out with a brand new book called nine steps to build a life of meaning. It ties right into the title of our episode here today. Help me welcome Rick Walker. Rick, welcome to Live on Purpose Radio. Doctor Paul, it's a joy to be with you and your audience. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. I have to tell you something, Rick. As I was reading your book, this is the thought that came to me, and I... I'm giving this to you as feedback, but it it it may fly as a compliment too. What I was gaining from your book felt more to me like wisdom than knowledge. K? And I think wisdom is knowledge combined with experience. I just wanted to give you that feedback right up front because not every book that I read has that effect on me. Oh, Paul, I really I really deeply appreciate that. The great author, Matthew Peugeot, has a great book on symbolism and and scriptural authority. He says that the difference between knowledge and wisdom is that wisdom is the spiritual dimension to knowledge. And that if you kinda think of think of knowledge or wisdom as two fulcrums, knowledge is the fulcrum that you use to move the material world. Wisdom is the fulcrum that you use to move the spiritual world. And, obviously, the spiritual world is what controls the material world. And so if you can get at knowledge, you can you can find the... If you can get at wisdom, you can find the knowledge to to to move the world. I like that. And and it fits with what I was picking up because there were a few things that really stuck out to me as I read your book. I... And one of those... I'll just throw a few out on the table, and then we can just sort out what we wanna play with as we as we open this conversation, Rick. Letting go was a recurring theme that I picked up on in your book. Another one was read old books. That one stuck out to me. There's there's some interesting ideas that you presented about sacrifice, which is kind of like letting go, but it has a little higher purpose and maybe even a spiritual attachment to it. Those are some of the just jump outs. Now as I put those out on the table, Rick, which one of those do you wanna pick up and run with? Well, let let... Let's look at the interconnectedness of all three, I think, Paul. Love it. So I would I would... I submit for your consideration, and this is a rule in the book, step two. It's... It comes up from a line from, Bruce Lee. Aiming low is the only sin. Aiming low is the only sin. And so so, obviously, you wanna be able to aim high at what you do. You wanna be able to get better. You're gonna compare yourself yesterday versus today and see how your trajectory is towards tomorrow. And if we can get away with... From our yesterdays and not let them inhibit where we're going tomorrow, we see that we can we can move forward in that. And so aiming high is the the central imperative of life to avoid sort of the sin of looking backward and looking down on not only others, but also looking down at yourself. And so the... But the only way to aim high is to look back. In fact, the majority of the wisdom, that's ever existed exists in the past. And I found personally that the older the book, the better the wisdom. The older the sage, the quicker the solution. And so we often will read the more current books, the the books from, you know, the last five or ten years, the hot books, to try to find these hacks and these tips. But the truth is the older sages have the quicker wisdom. You can apply it more quicker because it's it's less distilled than the newer books. It it gets back deeper and closer to to to true sources of wisdom. And and so we find that within within the proper aim that we we have to look back in order to aim up. The idea of sacrifice has to do with that in a way such that the only way for us to obtain something new and better is to give up what we have. The only way for us to see to tomorrow is to sacrifice our new days. In fact, you have no you have no other option but to sacrifice your days if you ever hope to see it to your tomorrows. And you can never really execute, in the present if you're... Unless you're willing to sacrifice that which you lost and gave up and the and the the mistakes of yesterday. And so we've gotta be able to be willing to to sort of move on to to give up on what, what we held on to, give up on the regrets, give up on the hurts, give up on the pains, give up on the people that that defiled us, that shamed us, that that talked down to us if we're ever ever able to, move on. In fact, it's the it's the effication of the moving on that requires... That that deems the past irrelevant. And and so you find you find that not the forgiveness, not only for ourselves, but also for everyone else who is ever needing to be forgiven, whether they've asked them to forgive us or not, is implied in the moving on. And, of course, in in the great in the great prayer of our lord, he says that forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sinned against us. It's not that it's not that we want to be forgiven. It's that the the method through which we're forgiven is we have to forgive those, even those who have never even asked to be forgiven. And so and so we owe it to ourselves and also those around us to move forward because it's only in forgiving others that we're ever offered forgiveness ourselves. And we've gotta be willing to forgive ourselves and accept forgiveness if we're ever able to move forward. There's a lot of juiciness there that we can unpack as we talk about how to build a life of meaning. And I realized as you were sharing this, Rick, you know, I've I've spent some time in your book. I've I've read your thoughts. And I may have skipped a little piece here on the podcast about why we should listen to you. Why do you even know this stuff, Rick? Can you just give us a little bit of the origin story of why you're so passionate about this now? Well, Paul Paul, I grew up in a two bedroom home, and we were we were fairly underprivileged growing up. I remember specifically, dumpster diving the back of grocery stores for dinner cans that we could take home and eat. My dad was out of work quite a bit. We just we just had a tough time. And so when I started my first business in college, I was able to get a loan from my mom for a thousand bucks. Eventually scaled that first business into 400 w two employees, sailed a second business into six states, then went and volunteered for a nonprofit at the same time I was selling these other businesses, and sold it from 800 to 2,300 team members in 53 countries. And so I did all that in my twenties and my thirties, and I learned a lot. I made a ton of mistakes. I I made more mistakes than than anyone else I I know. But I learned that I could accept forgiveness. I learned that if I realized I didn't know what I needed to know, maybe I could learn something new. And, and so I... And when I entered my forties, I saw this this generation of of young men, 25 to 45 year olds that that are generally in this meaning crisis, sort of a loveless, hopeless type of life. All these promises that were given them, when they were growing up that you'll be able to do this, you'll be able to do that, you'll be able to receive the respect that you're due. All these promises that they've been let down on in life. And I thought, well, what if I shared a little bit of sort of the practicality? Right? There's a lot of Mhmm. Pontificating out there on the Internet. And maybe it would be helpful just to have paired with that pontificating, just somewhere that someone has sort of done some stuff, with their life. And so, not not that I'm not educated. I'm not an educated person, but just I've I've done a lot of stuff sort of in the in the, the natural, in the business world. And so I read a thousand books, and that prepared me to write this one book paired with my experiences. And, Paul, god... God's been good to me. And, I'm just trying to give it back to that 25 to 45 year old, subset of men that are in this meeting meeting crisis and, try try to help where I can. I think you just nailed what I was picking up on initially, Rick, when I was talking about wisdom versus knowledge. Knowledge is free. I mean, especially nowadays. Information, if we just call it information, information is free. Containers are rare. And you said it so, nonchalantly just a minute ago. You said, well, I... I've done some stuff. And I kinda like the way you packaged that. Yes. You've done some stuff. You have reasons to know what you're sharing here. And and I think part of the beauty of this, because your book is not one of those old books that we refer to just a minute ago, it's your take on things that have existed in those old books and in all the books that have been written ever since there are common threads, I call these principles. Principles and techniques are not the same thing. And you'll see some books that are all about techniques. You'll see other books that are about the principles, the core underlying truths that drive this. And every book that inspires me draws on the knowledge of the ages and the wisdom of those who taught this long before we had AI or Google or video calls where I get to talk to you real time right now. We're not even in the same state. So, as you're sharing, why should we listen to you? Well, because you've done some stuff and what you've done, Rick, I think we can all relate to on some level, you know, what was your upbringing? And I see a lot of people in our society who blame their past for what's going on in their present. And I have a sense that, that's not how we create a life of meaning. That's right. That's right. It is... And it's a challenge too because, like I mentioned, I've done some stuff. So what I... Just to be very specific about that, I've failed a lot, and I've... I have lots of iterations. And so the tighter you get these iterations of these trying and failing, you learn feedback, you you get these these loops tighter and tighter and tighter. The more you can learn, the faster you can learn from your own mistakes. Obviously, it's not ideal to learn from your own mistakes. You wanna be able to read and learn from other people, but you can tighten up the iterations. You can learn faster. But people are so risk averse. They don't wanna do that. But the key to that, like you said, Paul, is understanding, like, what what is sort of the substrate of reality? What is the substrate of of of of wisdom itself? And from my perspective, I have I have a little bit of thesis that goes that goes like this. It says that the wisest possible mind looks at the most distant future for the most valued reward that it can purchase with the currency of the present. I'm a I'm a repeat that because I Yeah. Strike that by one again. K. The wisest possible mind looks into the most distant future for the most valued reward that it can purchase with the currency of the present. Now what I just said was a rearticulation of what we spoke about over the last five minutes, but is in a in a very, very narrow way that allows you to have a a framework to navigate life and to navigate decision making. Because if you're gonna live a life of meaning, meaning always has to do something with something with relevance. And relevance always has to do with the idea of indestructibility. Indestructibility. And like I said, that the the man who wants to live the higher life has to look back to the wisdom of the ancients. And the further back, the closer to the truth he gets, so too the wise man, the further he looks out into the future, he's able to think about longer term things. So the man that's focused on just earning a paycheck today to feed his family, god bless him, a great man, but he's not necessarily as wise as a person maybe just looking ten or twenty years out trying to take care of the college and the the weddings and the needs for his his wife, one day after he passes. And so these are two different men that have two different time frames that they have in mind. They're working... They're doing the exact same work, but they're... But the focus of their pursuit is different. And it's it's the focus of the pursuit that dignifies and sanctifies the pursuit itself. It's the focus. It's the objective. It's the it's the forward looking into the distant future that helps you rectify and and actually sanctifies the work that you've done, not only the future, not only the present work, but also the past work that you've done. And so the further out we can look, we can find greater and greater rewards so that the third man who's looking out for his great grandkids and his great grandkids and trying to instill this, this, progeny of of replication, of multiplication, of of generosity throughout the the ages is a wiser man than that. Just trying to take care of of one generation and himself. And so we see this move out. And so the further we can move out in the in the future, the higher the wisdom. And you think about someone like Elon Musk who's... Who stated goal is to make humanity an interplanetary species. He's thinking about thousands of years out. Mhmm. And that's a that's a pretty wise thing to do, but it always comes with a cost, and the cost is the presence because you have to buy the future with the currency of the present. Which is all we've got. That's right. And I I hear a lot of... I I call it a victim mentality when people get into a sense of we we can't do it because... And then they blame whatever it is. And it might be the currency of today. We don't have that technology. Well, we never had this technology before. And so that's a constantly evolving process. But if we're going to say I can't because, that's different from asking our brain, how can I? And using what's available to us now to build that. Correct. Correct. And I think that there's a... There's an easy there's easy sort of hack. If you're one... If you're a person that maybe is pessimistic in nature, a person that's maybe have a lot of downtroddenness in your background, is that you find out how can you make and view every threat at... Have the... Maybe the potential to become an opportunity. In fact, that's what a wise person does. He sees every threat as an opportunity. And if you can flip a threat into an opportunity, you begin to perform the actions of some of the wisest men alive. But if you only see threats as threats, well, then there's not really any hope in that. And so if you can if you can reframe your perspective on looking for the opportunities within the threats that are embedded in there, that... That's a great way to go forward. Now that doesn't mean that every threat has an opportunity. Some threats just might... Must be outright destroyed. Like, there... There's inherent manifest evil in the world that just has to be destroyed. There are only threats. Or there are threats that maybe don't carry an upside potential to counter the downside risk of them. And you gotta have a little bit of ability to be able to do that... To see that. But if we can look at threats and look for the opportunities within threats and figure out a way to flip those, we may fail the first two or three or five times or 10 times in doing that. But over the long run, we can build a little bit more confidence, a little bit more positivity in our lives, and a little bit more sort of future orientation in our lives, that can help carry us sort of out of the hell that we built for ourselves. Ricky just threw out another word. That's very near and dear to my heart, and that is positivity. And, I'm known as the positivity psychologist. It's what I do. I've written books on that topic. I've developed models because I believe we have to get past the trite, fluffy, just think positive that you hear out there, on stages or wherever, right, into the actual operation of the equipment of our brain. I would love to have you just comment about that for a minute. What have you learned about positivity? Maybe first of all, what is it to you, and why is it relevant to this conversation? So from my perspective, again, I'm not I'm not a trade professional like you are, doctor Paul. So I'll just sort of give me... Give you my, my, low my low my low education, public school education view on this. So I believe that positivity has to do with hope. Hope is one of those unique things that's pervasive. That if it happens somewhere at one time, it can happen anywhere. There are things like that within reality that that sort of, manifests in other places. And so I believe that, you know, if I'm hopeful about about life that maybe that can spread to you, Paul, and maybe it can spread to people in the audience that maybe don't have enough hope. I believe that if a hope... If a drop of hope exists somewhere, it threatens all threats everywhere. It threatens all threats. Not that hope just threatens depression and sadness and things like that. No. Hope is sort of a super abundant multiplier, force multiplier that can go and effectuate, a reality of change across a variety of dimensions, and it covers all threats everywhere. And some people may call that faith. Some people may call that optimism, but I think it's hope. But here's... The magical thing is you don't have to have hope that your situation will change. It's enough for my hope to exist that your situation will change, that maybe over the long term, enough communication, enough encouragement, enough prayers for your situation to change because I'm optimistic can permeate and pervade and overcome your resistance to that change. And that's one of the beautiful things that... About community is that my hope can invade your reality. Your hope can invade my reality and and terminate the threats and even switch the threats in my life into opportunities regardless of whether I want them to be switched into opportunities or not. And that's just sort of one of the magical things about about optimism, about having a hope mindset. Let me let me make another let me make another comment about mindset as well. I believe that the condition of your mind and the quality of your mind creates the quality of your reality over the long term. That, yes, we'll have we'll have devastations, we'll have losses, we'll have health issues, we'll have a variety complications, we're all gonna die. But I suspect that over the long term, the reality that you envision as being truth in your mind will manifest in your in your real life. And I don't say that in a way that means that the optics will change. I also don't say that in a way, sort of a woo woo way where, you can manifest your destiny. I say that in a way that, the things that you put out into the world are the same things you're gonna receive back from the world times 10. It's, I like the way Wayne Dyer put this or at least I... That's who I heard it from. Okay. When he said, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. And it's not that the thing itself changes. You were saying the optics aren't necessarily what changes, and and my circumstances don't have to be any different for me to claim hope. And by the way, when you brought that word out, Rick, hope is the number one preventative factor for suicide. Wow. And the tragic thing is hope is available on demand. When you understand how to operate the equipment of your own mind, when you understand what attitude is, which it... My pilot son taught me that that's an aviation term. Attitude is position. Okay. It's in in aviation. It's the position of the plane relative to the ground or the horizon. Right? Your attitude. I thought he was saying altitude. That's fascinating. That's fascinating. But... No. There's an attitude indicator in the cockpit of the airplane, and it's the most important, instrument. He's... He said a lot of planes have backup power supply just for that gauge, and it's more important than altitude. If you have the right attitude plus thrust and lift, you can get altitude. But if you're in a nose down position, you're heading into the hard stuff. Right? And I love that analogy because how we position ourselves relative to our circumstances is more important than what our circumstances are. That's right. That's right. Yeah. I think you can go back to the... Like, even the Herakles line, I, you know, it's been attributed to him anyway. You become that which you give your attention to. You find you find evidences of this in scripture that, those those who make idols become like the idols that they make. But that which you give your attention, the perspective that you give to the scenario in front of you is the thing that will mold you. Right. That's... That... There's there's so much there's so much truth in that. And if you could control your attention, you could control your destiny. That... That's... That seems to be, like, one of the most obvious things to me about about life, and we just give our attention away. We give our attention away to things. We we dwell. We we sort of, sort of spiral into these in these these death spirals about what's... What could possibly happen. And I've heard from my perspective, situations in reality are are often, you know, much much... Like, not as bad as they seem in in your imagination. Oh, yeah. And and so we just... We overthink too many things a lot of times. And so, you know, I think having these triggers as well. And this is this is what's important about having these quotes like you've dropped, Paul. Maybe having positive songs, commit... Or or large portions of of of literature committed to to memory is that when you catch yourself thinking, boom, you have an automated response. A response is something that you've memorized, and you recycle your brain. You re... You refocus your brain on something that's higher, something that's positive, something that will push you... Propel you forward rather than make you fall back. Because if you can't do that, all you're doing is digging another hell underneath that other hell that you've already created for yourself. That's all that's happening. Right. And I've I've also heard it said if you find yourself in a hole and you're trying to dig yourself out of a hole, stop digging. That's right. That's right. Maybe there's another solution to this. You know what? It's it's also really clear to me. This is what I've built most of my career on, Rick, is this idea that until you see it as a choice, it's not. And you'll roll with whatever your programming is. Well, I think what you're inviting us to consider here is to be more conscious that it's actually a choice and do that on purpose. That changes the game. Absolutely. The focus is your choice. You're you're not being forced to focus on certain things. You're not forced to to think about certain things. You're not forced into a reality of someone else's create... Creation and someone else's manipulation. Your destiny is your choice. Your thinking is your choice. Your your opportunity is is your choice. And if you focus on the threats without seeing the opportunity, you'll never move forward. You you focus on the past without seeing a potential for the future. You'll never be able to to invest the present wisely. And so that's why we've gotta figure out how do we reset our focus. Again, great books of the old, memorized, great passages, positive songs, positive quotes, positive podcasts. I mean, we've gotta be able to reset and have and have structures in place to be able to reset so that we can repeat these iterations of failure. If we can repeat and learn and get the feedback and and tighten up the the iterations, we can then propel ourselves out of this this this pit that we've did... Ourselves in. Tighten up the loop. Yeah. Rick, we could probably go on for hours. Good. I don't think we will today, but thank you so much for bringing this little chunk of wisdom to Live On Purpose Radio today. I want to make sure people remember what the book is. It's called Nine Steps to Build a Life of Meaning, again, by Rick Walker. And you can go find Rick at rickwalker.com. Not too hard. Rick, R I C K and Walker, just like people who walk and they can connect to you there. Rick, what else will they find there? What else do you want to make sure our listeners are aware of today? As they connect with you? Yeah. Yeah. So on my website, there's a ton of free tools. I have sort of life turnaround plans. I have enemy attack plans. If you have this great kinda big enemy you're trying to, attack, We talk about how to cobble together the competency to move forward, how to sort of shut off this this comfort that's been enslaving your potential. We've got a number of tools on the website. So, yeah, feel free to join it. Everything's free. And free is good. But when you're really ready, pay to play. That's how we know that people are committed. Yeah. Rick, this has been fun. Thank you for joining us here today at Live on Purpose Radio. It's It's been a pleasure. Thanks for blessing me. Appreciate you. Alright. You guys, you've heard it. It's time to apply it. Let's go live on purpose. Did you get what you came for? Give yourself the gift of taking real action action on what you realized today. Please share this episode with someone you know would value it, and leave us a rating too. It's time now to live on purpose.