---
feed: "DANIEL_ON_SLOPE"
codex_section: "S11"
source: VideoTranscript
title: "MENtrepreneurs Level One Series - Chapter01.05"
conv_id: "video-chapter01.05-2010"
share_url: "https://www.youtube.com/@MENtrepreneurs"
created: "2010-07"
message_count: 1
category:
  - "MENtrepreneurs"
  - "Level One Series"
  - "Chapter 01.05"
  - "What's Next"
  - "Emotional Awareness"
  - "Observer Exercise"
summary: "Daniel Comp leads an interactive, introspective Session 5 titled 'What's Next?' (with a humorous nod to andropause). Participants are instructed to become the 'observer' of their own internal emotional dialogue (referencing Wayne Dyer's 'third eye' concept) while solving a market-shift puzzle. The exercise reveals how emotional states directly impact business decision-making under pressure. Daniel shares his experience running a 17-employee construction company and constantly shifting between residential, commercial, and industrial markets. The central puzzle is a stylized number sequence (1–7) that most adults fail to solve quickly because their brain locks onto false patterns, while second graders often succeed. The session emphasizes that awareness of one's emotional state is critical for predicting 'what's next' in business."
keypoints:
  - "Becoming the 'observer' of your own internal dialogue (the 'third eye') is essential for making clear business decisions under pressure"
  - "Emotional states (frustration, pressure, curiosity, annoyance, etc.) directly influence how we interpret market shifts and make enterprise decisions"
  - "Life and markets change rapidly (as taught by Alex Zanardi); without emotional awareness, entrepreneurs get stuck in the wrong market segment and suffer"
  - "The brain loves to lock onto false patterns under stress, causing most adults to miss simple solutions that children can see clearly"
  - "Writing down emotional states in real time creates the self-awareness needed to shift from reactive 'boss' mode to proactive 'champion' mode"
tags:
  - "men-trepreneurs"
  - "chapter-01-05"
  - "whats-next"
  - "emotional-awareness"
  - "observer-exercise"
  - "wayne-dyer"
  - "market-shift-puzzle"
  - "internal-dialogue"
monomyth_stage: "07 - Approach to the Inmost Cave"
gameboard_position: "Camp 5: Approach to the Inmost Cave"
truth_score: 92
entropy_score: "Low"
tone:
  sentiment: "Playful"
  emotions:
    - "Introspective"
    - "Challenging"
    - "Encouraging"
  sycophancy_level: "None"
  notes: "This is one of the most interactive and personally demanding sessions in the series. Daniel deliberately creates mild frustration and pressure to demonstrate the point in real time. The tone is playful and slightly eccentric while delivering a profound lesson on self-observation. The number-sequence puzzle is a brilliant, low-tech way to show how stress impairs pattern recognition. No AI avatars; pure founder-led experiential teaching."
related_events: ["video-chapter01.01-2010", "video-chapter01.02-2010", "video-chapter01.03-2010", "video-chapter01.04-2010"]
syndication_status:
  arnie: false
  chris: false
  redmond: false
  clint: false
  pilot: false
ma5_inheritance: "Initium"
pre_silicon: false
voice_print: false
codex_candidate: true
phase: "Chapter 01 - Awareness: What's Next? (Observer Exercise)"
enriched_date: "2026-04-19"
---
![[MENtrepreneurs Level One Series - Chapter01.05.png]]

---

### Cleaned Transcript

**(upbeat music)**

**Daniel:**  
Welcome back to the Enterprising Cycle, Chapter One, and Part Five entitled, **What's Next?** Or if you're in andropause, what's next? Of course you could just be sorta, whatever. I think you're gonna have fun.

This one's actually an exercise that is gonna be a little introspective while you solve a puzzle, a challenge, a little bit of an emotional query, if you will.

And I need for you to get a piece of paper out so that you can follow along as I do this because the object here is for you to become the observer. For you, as Wayne Dyer would say, to be the third eye, the outside observer looking at yourself from the top of the elevator so that you can become aware of some of the internal dialogue that goes on inside of you.

Now, I'm gonna present a puzzle and I'm already gonna jump right into this.

On this sheet of paper, what I want you to do is write down your emotional experience, the things that are going on right now. For example, I could write down, "I'm having andropause, hot flashes at the moment." No, I'm just on camera. I'm anxious. No, I'm flustered. No, I'm puzzled. Hmm, I'm curious how this is.

So I need you to write those emotional words down. This is really important and I'm not just sort of playing with you. Well, okay, I am, but it's gonna be very, very helpful.

Why? Because when it comes to business and understanding how you make decisions about your enterprise, you really have to be aware of your state and particularly of the dialogue of your boss.

So "What's Next?" requires you to get out a piece of paper and a pen. So go ahead and pause and I'll wait for you.

**(upbeat music)**

Okay, welcome back. This session is gonna be edutainment. This is an interactive session where I want you to actually participate with me.

What I would like you to do is to become an observer to your own voice. I want you to write down on a piece of paper some of the words you might be feeling right now: confused, flustered, bewildered, frustrated, anxious, annoyed, irritated, puzzled, perplexed, nonchalant, dismissive, contemptuous, curious, lazy, impatient, cautious, patient.

Those are the words that popped into my mind as I was just sort of preparing for this, sort of anticipating what you might write.

What in the world? I thought this was about business, mentorpreneur, right? Well, it is in fact, and the reason that we're gonna do this exercise is that I wanna demonstrate to you that in order for you to care for your enterprise, you need to be greatly aware of the state of your boss.

Life comes fast, we learned from Alex Zanardi. And if we're not aware of the thinking going on inside of our boss's head, then we're likely to be ill-prepared for something coming on us — an unexpected phone call or a declined invitation, something that would affect your business.

And in order for us to look ahead and to predict what's next, what are the things coming in our marketplace, we need to understand exactly how our thinking affects our decision making.

Case in point, it's been snow on the ground for two and a half months. This moment is when the landscape is short. Whacking the noise out of the way, okay. So what that does to my thinking in this situation is it sort of throws a loop on me because my emotions sort of get escalated because now there's chaos that I have to manage.

Let me try to put this into context a little bit for you now that I've got a bunch of things going on in my head simultaneously.

I once owned a construction company, had 17 employees, and the markets in my industry were sort of like this. There was about three and a half years, a pretty decent peak, followed by three and a half years of trough, and that had been sort of predictable since the Depression era.

And as these markets would start dropping off, I would have to find work for my crews, so the way that I would do it is I would shift to a different market. And there were three markets. One of those was residential, one of those was commercial, and one was industrial.

So that meant that I had to look forward to what the market was doing and where the demand was and shift up what we were bringing to the market in order for us to be relevant and to be busy and productive. So we had to constantly shift from construction on... Gosh, that side again. This is amazing.

Okay, so we constantly had to shift up what we were doing in order to respond to the market.

Well, you can imagine if you don't have an attitude as a champion like Alex Zanardi, then you'd start getting hammered because you'd find yourself in the wrong part of the market as things would start dropping off, especially as you'd start getting desperate if you stuck with the same thing.

So sticking with something doesn't help, especially if you're afraid or fearful or stagnant or some of these others. So what you had to do is jump onto another piece of the market and take advantage of the mowers going by outside of it. (laughs) Put it into your product in some way.

Okay, so the reason why I want you to get out the card is so that you can start considering some of the emotions that are going on in you at this point.

So I want you to pause this and we're gonna set a baseline, if you will. Good experiment always has sort of a neutral state. Where's the baseline for your emotion at this moment?

So I'd like you to write down a number of words that you can sense, identify the emotional state within you. The thing that's going on inside of you at this... (bubble pops) I'm gonna just grab my microphone at this moment.

Is it chaos? Is it annoyance? Is it frustration? Is it curiosity? Is it, you know, "this guy's weird." Okay, I'm eccentric. Who else would be talking to a camera for themselves, by themselves, with themselves, all of those things at the same time?

All right, enough. Write down the emotions that are going on in your mind that identify where you're at at this moment.

**(upbeat music)**

So again, the purpose for this exercise is so that we understand how critical awareness of our emotional state is, because it's extremely relevant to our decision-making regarding our enterprise in response to the market.

Okay, say that in simpler terms. Hey, when we got a bad attitude, the whole frickin' world stinks. So understanding where we're at in order for us to change is critical. If we're not aware we're exploding, we're not aware of our tonality, if we're not aware of we're offending people around us, then it's likely we're driving business away as well.

All right, so here's our exercise.

You know, the miracle of video production is in the last frame, about six hours have gone by. In this time, my patience and my state have been tested like you just can't believe. Windows decided to do its patch, or I can't think of the word right now, but that took more than an hour. And one of the batteries was being funky on one of the OREA cameras. So that meant it actually dropped out the first time that I did this illustration and taped.

The second time that I did it, after resetting all the equipment up, turns out the electronic image stabilization setting was on the overhead camera, which meant that every time I drew something the image shifted all over the place.

So why I'm saying this? Simply that you need to understand, I am really practicing what I'm trying to teach you because if I were a delivery company, I would have packed it in and gone home today. If I were a carpenter, forget it, smash a couple of things, you know? Pound some nails really hard, but I can't do that. And you could read my emotions because I'm transparent, which has pros and cons.

So we're gonna do this puzzle one more time, and here's how it works.

What I'd like you to do is draw, we're all good up there, is draw a number of lines separated by a space. So this is representing, let's say, a number of periods of your enterprise, maybe a number of months ahead.

And this puzzle is for you to solve what goes in this period.

Now, your product that you're coming out with is represented here by, let's start with the symbol that's an M. Your first month's sales all fit within this product line. And the market shifts just a little bit, and it has to transform instead of an M into a heart. You know, you can modify a few things, repackage it, get it shipped back out, fix it all up, you're okay. You survive another month.

But you know what? Market shifts again, and instead of it being a heart, now this thing's gotta look like a spittoon. So retooling the factory, dropping all the things you just had produced, redoing it all, you know the stress.

But once again, the market continues to shift, and this time you're back into the M again. And you're just like Looney Bins, but fortunately you've got some inventory from the past, you can yank that back out, and you're all good.

And then of course the retro kids all come back, and they really like that spittoon, but they want it a little different. They want a little explosive bomb here now, right?

So what are you gonna project is the next one? What is the sequence here?

Now I'll tell you, if you get it right, you'll actually survive a month, and here's a way to check your answer, because they actually, the following month, are gonna want an inverted pyramid.

Now if you're following this, there's a little clue in here in the middle.

And I want you to know that I have never had an adult solve this puzzle in hundreds and hundreds of cases where I've presented this. I've had some second graders be able to do it.

And oh, by the way, I'd like you to be writing down your emotions all along the bottom of what you're feeling as I'm doing this. Like are you confused? Write that down. Are you feeling rushed? Are you feeling pressured? How about insulted? How about something else? Write your emotions down as they come up so that we can watch our boss think this one through.

Now your business rests on this. Your whole future is whether or not you can predict this next period in business. And if you're like Niederhofer in New York, September 11th, a number of years ago, this guy was worth $780 million. But he didn't predict what was happening that morning very well. And within a few weeks, $780 million poorer, he was borrowing money from his kids for groceries.

Okay, that's the kind of stories that happens with entrepreneurs because Alex Zanardi's experience, yeah, it happens.

So are you feeling pressured, stressed, anything coming on? What are the emotions?

Well, let me give you a clue just so you can sort of follow this. If you notice that what is common in every period of your company's production is this straight line. So you would think, hey, I got it, man, I know what's going on. And so go ahead, fill it in. I want you to, what goes right here? You gotta make that order now. It's time.

Well, I'm gonna show you what the answer is. And I want you to write down your emotions again. As in, yeah, right. Who's this guy think I am? Write down whatever those thoughts are that are going on in your head.

So the answer, well, let me show you how you get to the answer. Because you've known this since second grade.

So here's our first symbol. And as I was saying before, I've had one person solve this sort of, she was a physicist and actually sort of caught on to what was going on. But hundreds and hundreds of adults have never been able to solve this.

And it's because our brain starts to see patterns and it starts to say to us, oh, I know what's going on, look at this straight line.

Okay, well, now you can't see the answer, but I'm gonna show it to you and then you won't be able to unsee the answer. That's the weird thing about how this works.

All right, so let's take a look at this first symbol. And tell me if that looks familiar. Okay, how about this one? All right, so this symbol, is that familiar? How about this one? Four, five, and what goes here? A six. And then to check your answer, it's a seven.

So if you see what I've done, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The six does not have a straight line in it. And yet, that is how MENtrepreneuring is, how it feels when your boss starts talking to you.

And now you're looking at it and going, oh, that was kind of easy, I guess.

Let's talk about the emotions you felt before and after.

Next thing I want you to do is go to the poll, answer those questions, and then to the essay question, and we'll do some follow-up mentoring.

Well done.

**(gentle music)**

---

**CODEX ENTRY**

**Date:** 2010-07  
**File:** MENtrepreneurs Level One Series - Chapter01.05.md  
**Monomyth Stage:** 07 - Approach to the Inmost Cave  
**Gameboard Position:** Camp 5: Approach to the Inmost Cave  
**MA5 Domain:** Initium  
**Summary:** Daniel Comp creates a deliberately frustrating, real-time emotional awareness exercise in Session 5. Participants must simultaneously solve a market-adaptation puzzle (a stylized 1–7 number sequence) while tracking their own emotional reactions in writing. The exercise demonstrates how stress causes the brain to lock onto false patterns, why most adults fail to see simple solutions that children grasp instantly, and how emotional self-awareness is the missing skill that separates reactive "boss" thinking from proactive "champion" decision-making. Daniel shares his own construction company experience of constantly shifting markets to survive economic cycles.  
**Key Insight:** Under pressure, our brains create false patterns that feel true — and the only way to break free is to step outside ourselves and observe our own emotional state in real time (the "third eye").  
**Narrative Significance:** This is the capstone session of Chapter 1 (Awareness). It moves from intellectual understanding of scotomas and illusions into lived, experiential self-observation. The puzzle and real-time emotion tracking become a repeatable tool for men to use whenever life (or the market) "comes at you fast."

---
**INITIUM.**