The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell

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I was having a cozy Friday morning reading my 2030 vision statement for iAlign, and instead of just reading it to myself I put it up on screen and recorded it. This is probably a video that won't do well, but I wanted it on record so I can play it back in January of 2030 and see how much of it actually happened. So you get the whole thing, the mission of helping a billion people make one value based decision every day, an app built as a shield instead of another infinite feed, the expeditions, the papers we want to publish, how the team runs, and the life I want to be living while all of it happens, still driving the 2019 ProMaster, the Silver Sheila. Some of it is admittedly theoretical. I read it when things feel chaotic because it helps me prioritize, and I figured speaking it out loud was worth doing once.

Stop being the smart guy with all the potential who's stuck scrolling.

Click here to fill out the 30 second application, then book a call directly on my calendar.

Stoked,

Flint

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Links:

Instagram: @ialign.flintmitchell
Personal Website and Book: https://www.flintmitchell.com
TikTok @flint.mitchell
Youtube @ialign

Email: [email protected]

©iAlign, LLC

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I asked a guy who'd just told me his scrolling and procrastinating were a serious problem what he was going to do about it, and he said he'd take small actions toward his goals, which is really just doing what he's been doing and hoping it comes out different. If you were putting a hundred thousand dollars on a bet you could actually study for, you'd ask someone who knew more than you before you placed it, and his career is a much bigger bet than that. The reason it hits me is that I did the same thing he's doing. I was a research scientist in a lab with millions of dollars of equipment and the freedom to research whatever I was curious about, and I caught my reflection in the fume hood glass, goggles and gloves and the whole nine yards, scrolling the Instagram of a girl I'd met two years before. I spent painful years killing those behaviors, and it took years longer than it had to, because it never occurred to me to ask anyone for help.

Stop being the smart guy with all the potential who's stuck scrolling.

Click here to fill out the 30 second application, then book a call directly on my calendar.

Stoked,

Flint

---

Spotify Podcasts
Apple Podcasts

Links:

Instagram: @ialign.flintmitchell
Personal Website and Book: https://www.flintmitchell.com
TikTok @flint.mitchell
Youtube @ialign

Email: [email protected]

©iAlign, LLC

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A friend of mine looked me in the eyes in our fraternity house in college and told me these are going to be the best years of our life, and I remember thinking, we live in a brick tinderbox with broken glass on the floor that smells horrible. I had a great time there. It just wasn't the peak of anything. Now that I'm in my early thirties I watch people actually live that statement out, handing their few free hours to the Netflix show Barbara told them about and to people they don't care about, and it reads to me like giving up. One of the first lines in my book is that the way we spend our time is who we become, so this one is less about how you want to spend your life and more about what you do with the couple of hours a day that are actually yours.

Stop being the smart guy with all the potential who's stuck scrolling.

Click here to fill out the 30 second application, then book a call directly on my calendar.

Stoked,

Flint

---

Spotify Podcasts
Apple Podcasts

Links:

Instagram: @ialign.flintmitchell
Personal Website and Book: https://www.flintmitchell.com
TikTok @flint.mitchell
Youtube @ialign

Email: [email protected]

©iAlign, LLC

Send us Fan Mail

It was a Sunday night and I was reading Circles, one of my favorite essays by my favorite philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, so I read the passage out loud and then talked about it. The line I keep coming back to is at the end, the way of life is wonderful, it is by abandonment. The settled ones, the ones on the trodden round, are the procrastinators, the ones who stay in the overwhelm and keep talking about it, while the builder has already moved past it and drawn the next circle. Every one of those circles has its own learning curve, and the faster you move through them the faster you leave behind the ones you don't want to live in anymore. So this one is about abandoning the ring you're standing in, including the parts of it that are aligned right now but won't be later.

Stop being the smart guy with all the potential who's stuck scrolling.

Click here to fill out the 30 second application, then book a call directly on my calendar.

Stoked,

Flint

---

Spotify Podcasts
Apple Podcasts

Links:

Instagram: @ialign.flintmitchell
Personal Website and Book: https://www.flintmitchell.com
TikTok @flint.mitchell
Youtube @ialign

Email: [email protected]

©iAlign, LLC

Send us Fan Mail

I've got a cup here with the iAlign filter drawn on it in sharpie. I made it in a cafe in 2023 when a friend asked what I was working on, and instead of talking about the weather or the game I said let me show you, and at that point almost none of what I was describing existed. A decent amount of it exists now, and the same goes for the first version of my software, which I sent out to about 100 people and which was so bad it was embarrassing. I put it out anyway because it was the next small silly step. That's really what this one is about, that the small silly actions become the evidence you use to make the bigger decisions later, and the over planning and over researching never do.

Stop being the smart guy with all the potential who's stuck scrolling.

Click here to fill out the 30 second application, then book a call directly on my calendar.

Stoked,

Flint

---

Spotify Podcasts
Apple Podcasts

Links:

Instagram: @ialign.flintmitchell
Personal Website and Book: https://www.flintmitchell.com
TikTok @flint.mitchell
Youtube @ialign

Email: [email protected]

©iAlign, LLC

Send us Fan Mail

A client told me last week that he felt like he'd taken four steps back, because earlier in the year he was shipping and moving and the last two weeks have been mostly emotion and almost no action. I stopped him, because he isn't going backwards. He finally walked up to something he's avoided for a long time, asking for the raise, saying the uncomfortable true thing in the room, and his competency there is low, so all the emotion buried under it is coming up at once. The way I think about it is that action is the behavior you want multiplied by your competency at pulling it off, and anything times close to zero is close to zero. So this one is about why doing less in the hardest domain of your life isn't being worse at your life, you just changed lanes into the one you're not good at yet.

Stop being the smart guy with all the potential who's stuck scrolling.

Click here to fill out the 30 second application, then book a call directly on my calendar.

Stoked,

Flint

---

Spotify Podcasts
Apple Podcasts

Links:

Instagram: @ialign.flintmitchell
Personal Website and Book: https://www.flintmitchell.com
TikTok @flint.mitchell
Youtube @ialign

Email: [email protected]

©iAlign, LLC

Send us Fan Mail

When I first tried to get a grip on my own distraction I refused to call it a real problem, because I was the smart one, the engineer, the guy who could explain better than anyone exactly what he should be doing. Guys with plans that good don't have a problem, right. So this one lays out the six degrees of the misalignment gap, from the guy who loses a handful of days a year to the guy at 54 watching a man he trained three years ago run his department. What walks you down them isn't laziness, it's a quiet loop of missing an action, then shaming yourself for it, then avoiding, running in the background for fifteen or twenty years. I also go through the two response patterns I see, the builder and the seeker, and I'll say up front that I was a seeker, I literally published a book called Seeking Authenticity before mentors showed me my own self sabotage.

Stop being the smart guy with all the potential who's stuck scrolling.

Click here to fill out the 30 second application, then book a call directly on my calendar.

Stoked,

Flint

---

Spotify Podcasts
Apple Podcasts

Links:

Instagram: @ialign.flintmitchell
Personal Website and Book: https://www.flintmitchell.com
TikTok @flint.mitchell
Youtube @ialign

Email: [email protected]

©iAlign, LLC

Send us Fan Mail

The reframe that changed my life was this one. Procrastinating, overthinking, scrolling my phone, those aren't character flaws, they're what shows up when I don't have enough emotional resilience yet for the specific thing in front of me. Think about how you'd treat a friend going through something heavy who stopped showing up on time and couldn't focus. You wouldn't call him an incompetent person, you'd say this is a lot right now and he doesn't have the tools or the support in place for it. This one is about giving yourself that same read, because shame based accountability might work in the short term but it hands you a verdict about yourself every time something new knocks you on your ass.

Stop being the smart guy with all the potential who's stuck scrolling.

Click here to fill out the 30 second application, then book a call directly on my calendar.

Stoked,

Flint

---

Spotify Podcasts
Apple Podcasts

Links:

Instagram: @ialign.flintmitchell
Personal Website and Book: https://www.flintmitchell.com
TikTok @flint.mitchell
Youtube @ialign

Email: [email protected]

©iAlign, LLC

Send us Fan Mail

I was out on a morning walk in Ireland still turning over a conversation I'd had with a software engineer, because it genuinely upset me. We added his days up together, three or four hours of scrolling and YouTube plus three or four hours of focus lost at work, which is almost a full time job's worth of his week gone. Even two and a half hours a day is a thousand hours a year, and my book took me about two thousand hours to write, so that's most of a book sized piece of his life disappearing every year. Then I asked if he was open to help and he said he could probably do it on his own, and I asked how that had been working out. I can't force anyone to take the help, and that's the part of this that's hard for me to sit with.

Stop being the smart guy with all the potential who's stuck scrolling.

Click here to fill out the 30 second application, then book a call directly on my calendar.

Stoked,

Flint

---

Spotify Podcasts
Apple Podcasts

Links:

Instagram: @ialign.flintmitchell
Personal Website and Book: https://www.flintmitchell.com
TikTok @flint.mitchell
Youtube @ialign

Email: [email protected]

©iAlign, LLC

Send us Fan Mail

I pulled off Highway 29 in Napa with a turkey sandwich from Browns Valley Market, extra mustard and extra turkey, and sat looking out over a vineyard operation worth probably hundreds of millions of dollars. So I ran a thought experiment while I ate. If I owned that vineyard, would this sandwich taste any better? I decided it probably wouldn't change at all, and it might even be worse, because of everything I'd be carrying to be the guy who owned it. That's really what this one is about, the move where you take a feeling you want, calm, proud, at peace, and nail it onto some future outcome, so your sense of being enough sits locked in a vault you don't have the key to yet.

Stop being the smart guy with all the potential who's stuck scrolling.

Click here to fill out the 30 second application, then book a call directly on my calendar.

Stoked,

Flint

---

Spotify Podcasts
Apple Podcasts

Links:

Instagram: @ialign.flintmitchell
Personal Website and Book: https://www.flintmitchell.com
TikTok @flint.mitchell
Youtube @ialign

Email: [email protected]

©iAlign, LLC