The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell

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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

---

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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 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

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A friend asked me recently how paid content is performing against organic in my business, and the honest answer was that my numbers are a mix of real data, personal assumptions over gray areas, and anecdotes. I could have cleaned that up to sound more professional, but that would have been me reacting to embarrassment, and it would have cost him good information and cost me the help I actually need. Every learning curve is really a move from disorganization to organization, and I'm still partway up this one. The faster I can name the mess out loud, even publicly, the faster somebody who knows what they're doing can point at the problem. Precision gets created through iteration, so anything that slows your iterating down slows your precision down with 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

Several years back I got rejected from MIT, a spot in the affective computing lab that lined up with everything I cared about. I had built schematics for my own EEG in university, sent handwritten letters to professors who almost certainly threw them straight in the trash, and taken a red-eye through the worst turbulence of my life to get to a conference on their campus, where I talked to the guy who eventually turned me down. What I found walking around that conference was that this field is still the wild west, so if I wanted the technology to exist I was going to have to build it myself, and the first version I built was kind of shit. That's fine. Every rejection I've faced came out of an action I actually took, and taking the next one is the only thing that has ever made me more confident.

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 surfing on the coast of Chile thinking about the pain of feeling like I wouldn't live up to my potential, and it got too dark to see, so I took one last wave, got absolutely pounded by it, and rode in on my stomach. Walking the half mile back barefoot, rinsing my feet with the water bottle I'd left out to warm up, shaking out my towel to check for spiders, it hit me in the shower that the misaligned actions were only part of what hurt. The rest of it was how I treated myself afterward, because back then I mistook being hard on myself for accountability. That looks like it works for a little while, and then you watch YouTube instead of doing your homework, feel terrible about wasting the time, and soothe that feeling with more YouTube. What actually changed things was the opposite, taking every one of those self-shaming statements and turning it into something I learned about myself, which is what I'd call compassionate accountability.

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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I was 23, standing at the body fat scanner HR had put in the hallway at my biotech campus, and I told a colleague I was probably around 15 percent, and he laughed at me, and I was realistically somewhere around 23 or 24. A few weeks later the two of us set out to climb Mount Shasta, and the night before I was in a dive bar in Dunsmuir drinking cheap beer until about 12:30, buzzed and bloated and not remotely ready for it. I got to camp around 10,000 feet in pain and out of breath, so in the morning I talked up the storm to plant doubt about whether it was safe to continue, and we turned around and went and got a burger. Years later a guy who was five years sober told me that rock bottom is where you stop digging, and what I'd done on that mountain was decide this was mine, before I'd gained another 20 pounds or let anything get genuinely bad. That's the part I want you to have, because you don't need a disaster to earn the right to change, and I eventually went back and climbed it in my father's hiking boots with my grandfather's ice ax.

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 shape of this for me was always, it's 5:53, I'll use Instagram until six and then get back to the thing I was doing, and then you blink and it's 2 a.m. and you kind of hate yourself. It was never one big atrocity, it was thousands of small cuts like that one, starting with Super Mario Sunshine and RuneScape and running through YouTube in seventh grade and Yik Yak in college. The technology kept changing and the pattern never did, and if I take that two and a half hours a day statistic and admit mine was higher, that's something like 10,000 hours of my teens and early twenties gone. What it actually cost me wasn't the hours though, it was that I couldn't trust myself to follow through on the next thing I committed to. I still get the urges, I just catalog each one in my journal when it shows up, and after I move through it a few times it stops coming.

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

Right now I'm overcommitted as far as the hours I'm actually capable of working, which puts me somewhere I think is genuinely useful. A pop quiz in class counts for something but it isn't the test, and a math quiz is checking whether you can run some algorithm. This one is checking what emotion shows up when you've committed to more than you can carry, which for me is anxiety, and anxiety isn't a bad thing, it's just what shows up when certain things happen. The only reason I can say that easily is that I've been through enough of these to go back afterward and look at the grade with no ego on it, what did I feel, how did I handle it, did I just grit my teeth and did that actually work here. That's the whole opportunity, you collect a little data, you change a variable, and the next time that week lands you handle it better.

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's Sunday at two in the afternoon, the espresso I drank didn't hit, and the back of my mind just suggested we sit down and watch TV instead, which is the exact moment this one is about. I've got control over 98 or 99 percent of those urges now, but a couple always come in strong, and the reframe I use on those is, thank you, mind, I appreciate that thought, but could I please have another. All that's doing is saying a thought isn't meaningful just because I had it, so I don't have to take it. The funny part is your mind will hand you the same thought ten times in a row, and eventually it goes, fine, I don't know, read a book. It works on feelings too, you can tell your mind you'd rather not have the embarrassment and it'll offer you sadness instead, and you can turn that one down as well.

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'm filming this on my potato of an old laptop because I just poured a full glass of water onto my new one while moving a blanket, in a remote town in Chile about four hours south of Santiago by bus. The backup was basically the one thing I planned for, and I planned for it on two questions, how likely is this and how big is the consequence if it happens. That same filter is why I stopped where I stopped, because a third and fourth backup laptop would guarantee I could keep working and it would also be silly. If you're an engineer or a systems minded guy like me, the overthinking is genuinely fun and it's probably part of your superpower at work, you're just spending it on whether you need a fourth laptop. One of my clients said it better than I have, which is that I can do anything, but I can't do everything.

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