9/11 redefines every man's work

A man cannot know what he's truly capable of, until he finds himself in the heat of battle, forced to defend loved ones and everything he holds dear in this life.

However, it would be unwise to engage in battle without personal power.

And personal power comes from personal beliefs. This is why, on my 35th birthday, I sat down in a library and wrote on my laptop everything I believed in. It seemed like a good time to pause and reflect on what was happening in the world.

After a few hours of typing, I created the following document: http://www.geocities.com/omnidigitalbrain/freedom35.html

It was around that time that I began to realize that every man's work is radically redefined by the 9/11 attack. Any man who has a sense of honor cannot ignore the call to duty in a post-9/11 world.

First, I began to research the "terrorist problem" by reading America's Secret War, by George Friedman, the founder and chairman of Stratfor (also known as the "shadow CIA"). Friedman describes in spellbinding prose the chain of events that created a character like Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda organization.

The puzzling revelation for me was that after graduating from the University of Saudi Arabia in public administration and economics, Bin Laden took over a few family businesses and built a personal fortune of 300 million dollars.

Why would such an educated man, who obviously had everything to gain by keeping a low profile and enjoying his vast wealth, decide to challenge a mighty superpower? Indeed, there are severe risks to opposing the United States: in 1998, two Tomahawk missiles were launched against Bin Laden, at a cost of one million dollars each. The U.S. missed their target.

Osama Bin Laden got his revenge three years later, exacting a cost to the U.S. economy of over 80 billion dollars. And that's not even including the non-monetary costs in human lives and increased levels of fear.

Any talk of war makes me very uneasy, because I went through the war experience myself -- as a five-year-old boy. I escaped the Vietnam War by the skin of my teeth. If my parents had taken a few more hours to decide to leave Vietnam on April 30, 1975 I would have had a very different destiny. I would have been trapped in a communist-controlled country now ranked 142nd (out of 155) by the United Nations in terms of economic freedom.

In addition to trying to better understand terrorism, I also tried to create solutions for a more peaceful world. One important document I created, in 2004, was a mysterious manifesto called "Perfect Man Enterprise." It seemed like some voice inside of me just spoke, and I was just taking dictation.

This manifesto just said, basically, that the key to peace is to gather valuable knowledge and share it with all men.