The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell

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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

---

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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 read a lot of biographies and athletes keep coming up, because the way the great ones live is just flatly different from the way the average person with a nine to five lives. They have a World Cup, a specific tournament or stage they've decided matters enormously, and once that's there the small decisions stop being a fight. They're not waking up at 4:30 because they're superhuman, they go to bed early because they've decided the long term thing is worth more than what they're giving up. So this one is about picking your own version of that and filtering everything else down around it, which also means being willing to feel embarrassed, since I'm sitting here with my legs crossed at a weird angle and I'm posting it anyway.

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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People have told me I'm smart my whole life, and I do think I've been granted some real competencies, I follow threads in a conversation, I learn quickly, I've solved some cool complex problems. The trouble is that you sometimes do get things for exactly that reason, you get the benefit of the doubt because it seems like you understand, and you rack up enough of those small moments that you start believing the trait itself entitles you to the outcome. It works the same way for pretty people, who get plenty of real advantages in this world and are no more inherently deserving of them for it. Being smart may have gotten you in the room, but it doesn't keep you there and it doesn't build anything for you. The real risk was never that you weren't smart enough, it's that you're smart enough to coast for a while and mistake coasting for building, right up until you look up and notice the people lapping you aren't smarter than you.

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 a signal attenuates it doesn't actually disappear, it just gets smaller and smaller until it drops below the point where you can detect it, and theoretically it never hits zero. Put your own patterns on that same curve, the voice that says you're not good enough, the pull to open a new tab the second a problem gets hard, and here's the first part you won't like, which is that the day it's finally gone is not coming. What makes that freeing is it lets you stop shaming yourself every time a behavior you've run for twenty or thirty years shows back up. You solve the 20 percent of triggers causing 80 percent of the problem, and inside a few months the thing buries itself in the noise the same way throwing tantrums did when you were a kid. I brought scrolling back into my life on purpose for business research and found the triggers all still sitting there under the surface, I just lose an hour or two a month to it now instead of hours a day.

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

You've tried being more disciplined and it doesn't work, because it's Thursday you against Monday you every single week and Thursday keeps winning. My high school physics teacher worked at a top secret defense contractor right across the street from my school, badge access, the kind of job you're supposed to want, and one day he quit and walked across the road to teach physics to teenagers. He told me it was because he'd been watching the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they nail the ark into a plain wooden crate and wheel it into a warehouse with a million identical crates, and he decided he didn't want his life's work ending up as a box in a government warehouse. Then he showed up every day and taught with real energy and experiments, which is the whole point, because you don't revert away from things that are genuinely rooted in your values, you revert away from things that aren't. So this one starts with alignment rather than discipline.

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 doing Instagram research the other day and a video of the producer Russ slid across my screen, where he's talking about a song of his that went platinum four or five years ago and how people still find it and message him like it dropped yesterday. It drives him a little crazy because he thinks about that song every day of his life, and they caught a few seconds of it between a cooking video and their ex's story and went right on with their day. There's a sushi spot on Lombard in San Francisco I'd send you to without hesitating, and I have never once thought about it on my own when I wasn't standing in front of it or thinking about dinner. Nobody is sitting at home refreshing the page waiting for my work or yours, and that isn't a knock on either of us, it's just what being a person with your own life at full volume looks like. Which is exactly why polishing the thing in private keeps it safe from a crowd that isn't watching and helps precisely no one.

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 told a mentor I was overwhelmed one time and he said the most annoying possible thing back, which was that he'd probably feel overwhelmed too if he kept telling himself he was. I wanted to argue, because I had a real list, real deadlines, a genuinely heavy 80 hour week. The thing that shut me up is that I keep people like him close precisely because they carry more than I do, not less, and not one of them walks around narrating himself as the man being crushed. I'd already tried the obvious fix of cutting the list in half, and the load came down while the sentence in my head stayed exactly the same. So this one is about treating overwhelm as a whole environment you can tune, the people around you, what you're consuming, how you see the work, instead of something you white knuckle your way through.

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 a research scientist in Pleasanton, working out of an office we called the meat locker because it was full of dudes and had no fresh air, and one Wednesday afternoon I had Surfline open on a six inch browser window watching Santa Cruz go red. I sat there watching people fly across seven and nine foot walls of cold water, got anxious, drifted over to Instagram, and did quite literally no work the rest of that day. So I started switching environments every couple hours, then I decided it was my prioritization, then my setup, and none of it touched the thing. In my first week living in Ericeira I caught myself in a cafe looking at Airbnb instead of working, having already moved cafes over wifi I didn't need for the work I was doing. The room was never the problem, the wishing was, and that's really what this one is about.

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

There I am again, laptop on my stomach at 2 a.m., neck cranked at a weird angle, watching a Veritasium video that was interesting but nowhere near interesting enough to be keeping me up after I'd told myself for the 700th time I'd be getting up at 5:30. By 3 a.m. I'd clicked through to bench press takes and pickup line videos and I was tired and annoyed, and that's usually the moment it hits me that there's something I still haven't done. That wasn't a random night, it was a pattern I ran for over a decade, and underneath it was always an emotion I was avoiding, like the night I lay there sure that the guy I'd set up a meeting with was about to find out I was a fraud. If you're ambitious you're going to lie down most nights not having done everything you wanted, so the question is what you have in your toolbox to handle that instead of numbing it.

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 went through a breakup years ago with a woman I loved dearly, and I spent a lot of those nights lying on the beige carpet in my room staring at the ceiling trying to work out how to make it right. My workouts got less consistent, my focus went fickle, and my work kept getting interrupted by my own head. The story underneath it was that the emotions wouldn't be this strong if the thing wasn't this important, which sounds convincing and is wrong. If a stranger punched you in the throat on the street you wouldn't call it an important experience, you'd call him a prick. So I built a checklist of mostly yes or no questions I'd run for 60 to 90 seconds every time one of those emotions showed up, sometimes seven or eight times a day, and I read you the actual thing in this one.

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