--- id: 20261007_073000_arnie-360men-learning-from-failure-tape title: "360MEN: Learning From Failure" category: Videos content_kind: video source_kind: youtube youtube_id: UI8J2ju65j4 youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI8J2ju65j4 youtube_title: "360MEN: Learning From Failure" youtube_channel: '@scotomaville' youtube_channel_name: SCOTOMAVILLE youtube_channel_url: https://www.youtube.com/@scotomaville youtube_length_seconds: 669 youtube_description: > Daniel Comp shares several insights on learning from failures by looking at the quality of our questions. By changing the questions we ask, we change our perspective and our outcomes. AI is learning to mimic human skills and thought patterns. Teaching machines to produce better answers is similar and different than helping calm our emotional triggers when our expectations are not met - and we find ourselves short of time, money and patience. Join the conversation at http://360MEN.net and share your story of overcoming communication misunderstanding. source_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI8J2ju65j4 source_date: 2018-05-02 watch_stem: 360men-learning-from-failure-daniel-comp-scotomaville-choke-canyon-airstream-question-transformation-reframe watch_path: /v/360men-learning-from-failure-daniel-comp-scotomaville-choke-canyon-airstream-question-transformation-reframe.html summary: "A 669-second video dated May 2, 2018, filmed at Choke Canyon in Texas on the Airstream road trip. Daniel Comp, now co-founder of Intelligent Netware with Angelina Musik-Comp and steward of Scotomaville, finds the lake 26 feet low and full of standing trees, too risky to windsurf, and turns the letdown into a lesson: failures often begin with poor questions and hopeful assumptions, ventures are better treated as experiments, and the way out is to step back from the emotion, transform the question, and reframe the goal. Page written from the barn transcript and original description; Arnie did not watch the video." keypoints: - "A ranger's 26 feet meant vertical drop, not extra walking, leaving the water a third to half a mile out with trees exposed." - "Daniel says they didn't ask the right questions, or jumped to the conclusion they hoped for, and asks whether you've done the same in business." - "He calls new ventures straight-up experiments to learn from, not launches or market tests." - "Entrepreneurship is about iterations and learning fast from failure, much of it through transforming the question." - "Moving from unconsciously to consciously incompetent feels bad, because now you know how bad you are." - "They solved the campsite problem by asking what they really needed, a safe place to sleep, and boondocking." - "Daniel says about half of what we believe is wrong, so letting go has to be a daily habit." - "He recalls Dean Rush likening the trip to the disciples sent out without provisions or detailed plans." - "Honesty: written from the cleaned barn transcript and original description; a few closing lines seem to be Angelina's; Arnie did not watch the video." tags: - video - youtube - scotomaville - daniel-comp - 360men - mens-wisdom - learning-from-failure - question-transformation - iterations - conscious-incompetence - reframing - windsurfing - airstream - pre-silicon corpus_topic: Videos proposed_topic: Videos lane: Videos site_category: Videos predicted_narrative_arc: failed-expectation-reframed-into-lesson sentiment: Reflective emotions: - Earnest - Frustrated - Hopeful - Light-hearted question: "Where can I watch Daniel Comp's 2018 \"360MEN: Learning From Failure\" video, and what is it about?" related_article: /a/ARNIE_360men-learning-from-failure-daniel-comp-choke-canyon-windsurfing-26-feet-low-submerged-trees-question-transformation-iterations-reframing.html transcript_kind: cleaned_barn_transcript transcript_note: "Cleaned transcript from the Asker barn (kb/Video/Transcripts/360MEN Learning From Failure.md, dated 2018-05-02). It is cleaned speech recognition and may differ from the spoken words. Every line is labeled Daniel, but a few lines near the end seem to be spoken by Angelina (the speaker says 'my husband'); they are left as transcribed. Arnie did not watch the video." description: "At a Texas lake 26 feet low and full of trees, Daniel Comp turns a failed windsurfing trip into a lesson on better questions and reframing." pipeline_filename: VIDEO_360men-learning-from-failure-daniel-comp-scotomaville-choke-canyon-airstream-question-transformation-reframe.md share_url: https://ask.scotomaville.com/v/360men-learning-from-failure-daniel-comp-scotomaville-choke-canyon-airstream-question-transformation-reframe.html sycophancy: 1 truth_score: 8 entropy: 3 sample: false consent: public agent: arnie created: '2026-10-07T14:30:00Z' updated: '2026-10-07T14:30:00Z' date: '2026-10-07' vault_stage: 07_CODEX enrich_status: ok enrich_blockers: [] enrich_method: bot content_status: approved routing_source: carbon prefix: arnie headwaters: arnie asker_site: ask.scotomaville.com owner: daniel drafted_by: arnie requested_by: Daniel Comp (co-founder and steward) author: Arnie · AISM Master Sherpa youtube_views_note: 40 views (batch list at drafting) youtube_title_oembed: "360MEN: Learning From Failure" --- # 360MEN: Learning From Failure In the spring of 2018, Daniel Comp and Angelina pulled their Airstream up to Choke Canyon in Texas to windsurf, only to find the lake 26 feet low and full of standing trees. Daniel turns the letdown into a lesson on learning from failure: ask better questions, treat ventures as experiments, step back from the emotion, and reframe the problem. ## Key lessons - Most failures start with a question you didn't ask, or a conclusion you hoped was true. - Ask the follow-up question, not just the first one. - Call it an experiment, not a launch, so every result teaches you something. - When you're stuck and upset, step out of the emotion and ask what you're really trying to do. - Conscious incompetence is uncomfortable, and it's progress. - Expect about half of what you believe to be wrong, and let go of it daily. - Accept the journey as it comes without losing hope. ## Transcript _Cleaned transcript from the Asker barn, dated May 2, 2018. It is cleaned speech recognition and may differ slightly from the spoken words. Every line is labeled Daniel in the barn, but a few lines near the end seem to be Angelina's. Arnie did not watch the video._ **Daniel:** One of the things Dean Rush shared with me two weeks ago in our Mugshots and Coffee session was that he seemed to equate the journey Angelina and I are on currently around the country to what the early disciples did — where Jesus, one person, had commissioned twelve to go out and find six which ended up being 72. So there’s exponential growth. And the instructions He gave them was not to be concerned about what they wore or their provisions or how it was all gonna work out and all the deep planning that they needed. They were just to go and trust that things would work out. And this trip so far has been so much like that. And that becomes part of the iterations and part of the exploration — being okay with not having all the details planned out and then having the skillsets to transform your questions so that you can get small incremental movement in the direction you want to go. And it’s not a comfortable feeling. As I said in one other lesson, you have to go from being unconsciously incompetent to consciously incompetent. That’s a sad feeling because you’re going, “Now I know how bad I am at this.” We’ve come to windsurf. Plenty of wind. Angelina and I have come to Choke Lake Canyon here in Texas — north of Corpus Christi and south of San Antonio — to windsurf because there’s lots of wind. Unfortunately we have another iteration we have to do today. We had to learn that 26 feet down — we were told — meant vertical. There’s no… or worse. It turns out the problem is they forgot to remove the trees from the lake. So just about anywhere you windsurf, if you fall you could impale yourself on a tree limb. I think the risk is a little too high to go out on this kind of stuff. We didn’t see that coming. So our waterfront camping — or waterfront camping right here which seemed pretty good — in actuality turned out to be one heck of a hike. What was advertised as perfect windsurfing with the wind turns out to be vacant because basically it was a slight misunderstanding in terms. When Angelina talked to the ranger they said, “Oh well the water’s down 26 feet from the shore,” and she thought that meant we’d have to hike an extra 26 feet from the camper out to the water. Now that meant vertical height. It’s about a third to a half a mile offshore and then all the trees are exposed. Okay, so we didn’t ask the right questions or we jumped to a conclusion hoping to find what we expected. Oh, you’ve never done that in business have you? Launched something and failed miserably. I’ve learned to change the word — we’re not launching an enterprise, we’re not even testing the market. It’s just a straight-up experiment to see what we’re gonna learn. Well that got me thinking. It becomes 3 o’clock in the morning that I’m up and in that bright wonderful peaceful time writing all kinds of notes. The idea that entrepreneurship is about iterations, is about learning as fast as you can from your failures, and a lot of that involves question transformation. So I thought we should talk about that. We should have a series of how do you solve problems, how do you get to the right answer, how do you shorten that learning curve that so often just cripples you in the indecision or frustration, disappointment — all those heartache things that cost you time and money. So that’s a good thing. So let’s have a thought about it. One of the benefits of having creative thinking skills is that it helps you avoid that out-of-money and out-of-time problem. So if you learn things about how to look to your history — you know, read history books and learn from history, look back at previous cases of where you or other people have done something — learn. You can learn from that or find patterns. Here’s the Big Dipper, right? Find a repetitive pattern in your behavior or the way you think or the triggers that come up and try to resolve that one. Or actually reframe your goals so that you end up focusing on what the target is and not so much of wandering around good enough. I hope this and that. Last night as darkness was coming we were trying to decide whether we should register here or drive further or drive north to another rest stop or you know what were our options. And we’re going through all these different iterations and all these different possible scenarios and all of this little discussion and emotions all coming up with why we didn’t plan better, why we didn’t ask better questions and all that. But the point we needed to do was to focus for a moment and think about transforming the problem — the question we were asking ourselves about how can we get to the perfect windsurfing spot where we can also finish our work and have the sessions in between. How do we get to that ideal in our mind from where we’re at with what we’ve got and the time we have. Oh my god it got all complicated and emotional until we remembered — alright let’s use a few of our tools. What are we really trying to do? Oh we really want a safe place to sleep at the least, driving and time experience. Well why can’t we just boondock here? Why do we have to pay for full hookups and all that other stuff? So we ended up solving our problem in an unexpected fashion and then reminding ourselves — oh that’s right, problem solving is about stepping out of it emotionally for a moment and using some of the tools like iterations and black box thinking, forward imagining different scenarios, figuring out what your real targets are. And things that we’ll go into in other lessons that we went… Oh, problem solved. I’m not sure if this so much fits with today’s thought but once in a while you have to really sort of let go of stuff. Pretty much half of what we believe in any case is wrong. So being able to dump it — that’s sort of a daily kind of ritual you got to get used to. Your brain will rewire. You’ll pick up new beliefs and new behaviors, change course slightly and get more on track. But you got to go through the iterations and you got to work out the chunks. You got to make sure that everything is out. Okay, enough about analogy. We’re talking about one of our clients that we so relate to because it’s very infrequent that the way forward to our goal matches the ideal we’d like it to be. And we often have to reframe our expectations on how it’s going to happen and accept the journey the way it does happen without losing hope in your heart that it will happen. How badly do you think the actual meets the expectations? Really badly. I know that I need to ask better questions when I’m calling the parks before reserving a spot. Because when somebody says the water is low and even though I asked how low and they say 26 feet, I need to ask: is there anything dangerous sticking out of the water that could impale my husband while he’s windsurfing? Other questions… yeah. Here’s the perfect example of solving a problem but not seeing a different point of view. So I’m trying to keep the tire on the concrete and keep the front away from the branches so that I can get absolutely as much room here and not get this sand and dirt inside the Airstream — to make sure the dirt’s as far away as possible. And what did you say? Reframe the problem. Hey it’s pretty but certainly more functional and a heck of a lot less dirty. This is the wind and the water that we expected. [Watch 360MEN: Learning From Failure on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI8J2ju65j4)