Understanding the Difference Between Mindfulness and Being Intentional With Daniel Mangena

Welcome to the Marketing Growth Podcast. I’m your host, Shane Barker, and we have Daniel Mangena with us again today. On the last two episodes, we talked about his entrepreneurship journey and why having a clear intention is crucial for finding success in life. Let’s pick up the conversation where we left off.

I want to talk a little bit about this because I know you touched on this, and some of the content I’ve seen you put out there is about mindfulness and why entrepreneurs should focus on mindfulness, right? We’ve heard these terms as entrepreneurs and as people, being intentional and mindfulness. I think the connection between what needs to happen and being able to make that happen is always the disconnect, right? Do I read a book once again? What do we do? That’s always the thing. What?

And I think that’s where we get into this thing of, oh, this is what Elon Musk does three times every morning before he gets up and starts his day. And this is how you can become a billionaire. And it’s a 300-word article, and I don’t think those three things are the reason he’s a billionaire, but maybe it’s because he puts his feet in cold water. I don’t know. I mean, who knew that was? I do that every day. So now I feed in cold water, and I’m gonna be silly this. Yeah, exactly. I’m just waiting for the money to transfer at this point.

But what is the difference between mindfulness and being intentional? I think that’s always been a disconnect for me. What is that? What’s the differentiator there?

That makes total sense. I think that’s the thing, the biggest thing. And we’ve said this—I don’t know how many times now—it’s gonna be work, right? That’s where I think people get in their mind—”I want, I don’t want to do.” I don’t want the nine-second AB. I want the six-second abs, right? That’s what I want to do. I just want to work out six seconds a day, eat cupcakes, drink beer, and do all the stuff that I do. And I want my abs. But what are you doing to put in that work?

I think that is always the missing piece: most people don’t put in the work. I’ve worked with one of my influencers who reached $1.6 million selling fitness ebooks, and they weren’t anything magical. It wasn’t a super magic push-up that nobody’s done or “this is how you do the crunch in the air on your magical floating”; there was nothing. It was literally just the same workout you could look at on Pinterest or find on someone’s website for free. There was no magic to it.

But the thing is, it just comes down to putting in the work. That’s what it is: if you did push-ups for the next three months—50 a day—you probably have a chest. It’s that next step of putting in the work, of making it happen, that I think is where people get that disconnect. They always want to skip some of the steps. I want to get there. How do I get there faster or sooner? Stuff like that.

I think that is a problem because there’s a reason the framework you guys have put together exists. You can’t have one without the other, and even if you do, you’re not going to get to where you need to be.

Absolutely, it really is. I mean, I think that’s the hard part. Yes, the probability thing—can it happen? It can, right? But we look at the probability. Of anything I would think of, my good old stats teacher—who I wish I would have paid a lot more attention to—shout out to my old stats teacher. I knew you were saying some cool stuff. I thought it was just for betting and stuff, but that was actually going to maybe equal something in my life, something I’d have to pay attention to.

I think that’s the hard part—being willing to grind it out and put in that work. That’s where the hard part is. There’s all kinds of stuff in my life that I’ve wanted to do, and a lot of the time, they’re uphill battles. Most of the stuff we want to do, right? But you have to be willing. For me, I enjoy that. I enjoy the journey of doing something uncomfortable and trying something new.

Like going to Florida with some guy named Andrew who said he did Ayahuasca in the end. That’s a case in point. Literally, my wife was like, “So you’re going out to Florida?” And this guy was actually a lead who came into my website—that’s how well we knew each other. When I got there, I was looking around thinking, this is pretty much where people die. I’m not going to make it out of here. So there was a lot of growth that happened through not dying, through making it through the experience.

Exactly. Shout out to staying alive.

So anyway, I love that. What would you say, when we talk about mindfulness, how has mindfulness helped you as an entrepreneur? How has that helped you stay focused in the businesses you’ve built?

I can confirm that. I’ve always been an entrepreneur—literally forever. And I think one of the hardest things people don’t realize is that becoming an entrepreneur is difficult. People think the journey is a straight line from here to there, but really, it’s a wiggly line. It’s all the things that happen, the things you have to deal with just to become an entrepreneur.

I always tell entrepreneurs—I’ve been doing a lot of consulting for the Small Business Administration here in the United States—I always say this: if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. That just comes down to the fact that it’s going to be difficult. But the thing is, you’ve got to know—are you built for that? That’s really what it comes down to. Are you going to be able to take some punches and get back up? Because it’s going to happen, over and over and over again.

There’ll hopefully be a point where you can sell your business for millions of dollars, or whatever your goal is, but to get there, there are going to be a thousand right turns, left turns, pivots—rock bottom moments—and then you’ll climb back up. People aren’t built for that. We’re not trained for that. Most of the time, all we see is the upside.

I took a class—this was a long time ago in college—and it was an entrepreneurship class. The crazy part was, the teacher asked, “Why do you want to be an entrepreneur?” I remember the students saying, “I’ve already been an entrepreneur,” or “I just don’t want to have a boss.”

And the teacher said, “If you want to own a restaurant, every person that walks into that restaurant is your boss. They’re going to have suggestions, complaints, want to talk to you, and have issues with the server—those are all going to be your bosses.”

And the student was like, “Well, I just want to open a restaurant and collect money.” Okay, so someone else is running your restaurant, and I’m pretty sure they’re going to be stealing from you because you’re not actually running your own business.

So I think it comes down to this idea of what it really means to be an entrepreneur. And I love that you touched on this earlier—talking about the ups and downs. That’s what it is. The good things you’ve done, the bad things you’ve done—it’s that journey.

Because I think that’s important. We’re not always mindful. We want to be, but we’re not always in the present moment. Sometimes that becomes difficult—through investing, or through decisions we’ve made.

So I love that. I love how honest you are about it. The things you should be doing, the ups and downs, the challenges—you talk honestly about all of it. I really appreciate that.

Might be a little bit of a lag.

100%. And that’s what’s crazy—to think about that. Can most people handle that mentally? Not only once, but twice? That takes real resilience. Not a lot of people are built for that.

When you lose everything—that’s tough. Our patterns are very similar. I had a business that I built up to $25 million, and it got taken from me. That’s a whole other story—we don’t have time on the podcast today to go into everything that happened there—but it was a $25 million business I was just about to sell, and it got swiped out from underneath me.

The next day, I was like, man, what just happened? I literally just lost millions of dollars overnight. A lot of people don’t know that story about me, which is a whole other conversation. But it’s an interesting thing to be brought back down to square one and think, man, what is going on right now? This is just crazy.

I want to talk about that a little bit. I can imagine during the pandemic, with everything going on in the world, it became difficult to stay focused. How were you able to stay mindful during that time?

I love that, right? Because we’re not. The last time I checked, nobody’s lived forever—unless you’re Elon Musk. I think if you put your feet in cold water, that does postpone it for 10 years. I’ve heard you get some years added on for that.

I love that. My mom’s talked heavily about this. What I mean by that is, she talks about, what are you in control of? What do you have power over?

Because you can’t control the political stuff. Whether you’re Democrat, Republican, Green—whatever you resonate with—at the end of the day, it’s you. I’m not a heavy political person. I’ll have conversations with people, but for me, I just look at my environment, I look at the people around me, and I focus on the things I can control.

People say, “Oh, but what happens if this happens?” Well, then I’ll just do this. For me, it’s not something I stress about. I look at what I have within my realm—what I have some type of control over—and those are the things I focus on. I can’t tell you what President this or Chancellor that is going to do. I don’t really have control over that.

Yes, I can vote and have some power there. I get that. But at the end of the day, I don’t really have control over it. I can stress about it every day. I can read about it, get anxious, and spiral into all the other stuff that comes with trying to grasp what’s going on. Or I can just say, “You know what? These are the things I’m in control over. These are the things I can focus on.”

I can have a say. I can empower myself by taking control of that. I think it’s important for people to realize—if you’re out there focusing on third-party stuff you have no control over, you’re going to lose your mind trying to control it. 100%.

No, they’re not. Because all they’re going to do is—they’re going to look out for themselves. You’ve got to care about yourself, and you’ve got to take control of what you need to take control over. It’s not going to be easy, but you have to.

I always talk about people living rent-free in your mind. And if they’re living rent-free in your mind, you’ve really got to take a look at that and ask, is anything good coming from this? Is this making me happier? Is this getting me closer to who I want to be—as a human being, as a father, dad, whatever it may be?

Daniel, this was awesome, man. Like I said, I knew this was going to be a fun interview with you. I already knew your personality, and I knew we’d be able to ask some good questions, and you’d be able to help us think through things—being mindful and intentional.

So I do have a few—we call it the fun section. Not that we didn’t have some fun before this.

Yeah. No, you gotta get ready. Get loose, my friend, because this is where all the fun happens.

If you could travel to one place in the world for free, where would it be, and where would you go?

I heard rumors about that. It goes really deep. Does it go to China? No, I don’t know if that stops.

Thank you, Daniel, for joining us. It’s been a pleasure to have you here.

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Next week, we’ll bring you tips and advice from another marketing leader, so stay tuned for more interesting insights and industry trends.