The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell

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Everything in life has a three to four week lead time minimum, and the moment I actually accepted that about my own work is when I started making faster progress. Two things happen once you believe it. You have to filter much harder, because you can't run many things for many weeks all at the same time, and you have to stop validating results and start validating effort, because the results aren't allowed to exist yet. Then you zoom out and the year is only twelve months long, so in one domain that's maybe twelve big things, maybe six. That isn't many spaces to fill, which is why what goes in them has to be chosen really specifically.

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 spent two years deciding whether to apply to medical school, and I didn't spend them thinking. I volunteered in hospice care at 22, I shadowed surgeons in the fields I found interesting, and I studied for the MCAT while I was working as a research scientist. Then it was pouring in the Bay Area on the morning of the test and I drove in wearing a red and white Aloha shirt with an eight foot soft top in the back in case the rain let up afterward, and the second I pressed submit on the last question I thought, ah, not for me. That was it, really, that was it. The decision only took two seconds because it had already taken two years, and I have quite literally never once asked myself what if I'd been a doctor.

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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The first real step I took out of my job at a lab building genetic sequencing technology was buying an $18,000 2018 Ram ProMaster City van that I'd eventually build out and live in. What made that hard wasn't the van, it was the thousand small questions sitting behind it, where's the dealership, how much can I afford, do I build it out myself, how do I tell my boss, how do I bring this up to my girlfriend. If I'd wavered a couple of days on each one of those I'd still be sitting in that same moment from years ago. The pushback I always get is, what if I prioritize wrong and take the wrong action, and my answer is that you will, and that's good, because choosing exactly right the first time would just be luck. The point isn't to choose correctly, it's to take the first actions that give you the evidence to know what the next one should be.

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 have a hot take on relationships, which is that a lot of people are running into partners and friends whose emotional maturity is nowhere near what they were hoping for, and I don't think that's only about comparison and endless options. I read some research saying people average around two and a half hours a day scrolling, which is roughly 900 hours a year, so over ten years that's 9,000 hours of your life paused. Practice is what makes anybody good at anything, and all those paused hours were hours you would have spent around other people. So now we've got a lot of 25 and 30 and 35 year olds walking around with less real life experience than earlier generations had at that age. I want to be careful with my words here, I'm not saying worse human beings, I'm saying less capable ones, and honestly that's a little scary.

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 week or two into every January I feel like absolute shit about myself, no matter how well things are actually going, and I've given up trying to work out why. What matters is that the pit in my stomach coming back doesn't mean I've lost any of the ground I gained, because the emotions themselves mostly never go away, you just get better at handling them. There were a couple of days this past holiday season I could have handled better, and I can name exactly what I'd change, saying yes to fewer things and sorting out before I travel where I'll work out and where I'll shop for food. That turns the low into something I'm almost looking forward to testing next year. The people you admire for their discipline feel the same anxiety and embarrassment you do, it just moves them less.

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 nearly midnight on a Friday in a small coastal surf town in Chile, I had a couple more hours of work I wanted to do, and the voice in my head said, it's late, put a movie on while you work. I grabbed the camera right then because that voice sounds like relief and it isn't. If I do that I don't focus on either one, and what I'm giving away is the middle part of focus, which is the part that actually feels good. Gardening is the example I keep coming back to. It's moving dirt from one hole to another, completely unglamorous, and it's enjoyable purely because you're focused on it. Split my attention and I won't enjoy the movie and I won't finish the project, I'll just get restlessness.

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

Men get assessed by what they create and how they provide, and at the end of January, when everybody is falling off their goals, you feel it more than any other time of year. There's a whole modern line saying that isn't true anymore, and the intention behind it is good, but it lands as gaslighting, because the same people who say open up and tell me how you feel get uncomfortable the second you do and shut it down. So you're told to your face that your worth isn't your output while being measured on exactly that underneath. My own position probably annoys both sides of that argument. Being less isolated and more emotionally expressive is one of the most effective tools there is for becoming more productive and more capable, which is what the world is going to judge you on regardless.

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 lying on the floor of my apartment like a corpse. I'd just pulled from savings to cover rent, my relationship was ending, I wasn't sleeping, and the business was in one of its first real lows, and the voice in my head said, what an opportunity, and I laughed and said fuck you. That voice is only there because I spent years training it. For the first 25 years of my life I ran on shame and self-criticism instead, and shame does get you moving sometimes, which is exactly why people trust it, and then it hands you straight back to the scrolling and the overeating. If I'd been talking to myself that way on that carpet I would have quit, no doubt in my mind. Nothing external knocks you out. The last blow is always your own.

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 after university I'd go to the bar with my colleagues after work pretty regularly, while telling myself I was getting back into soccer shape and mountaineering shape. A year into that job I'd firmly established the habit of putting their happy hour ahead of my own health, and I got overweight. A client of mine said this better than I ever have. He told me he's 30 years old and can't honor a commitment to himself, that he'll do anything not to let other people down but the minute it's himself he doesn't care, and this is a guy who graduated with honors and then spent ten years working for what everyone else wanted. What actually changed it for me wasn't willpower. It was finding a way to say no to the happy hour invite that I could feel okay saying.

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's no such thing as a clean slate. I could start over in a new place with new people and I'd still show up carrying my current body and my current mind. The version of this I'm least proud of is a New Year's Eve where I sat in a hot tub with a beer, overweight and not liking how I looked, mentally listing all the changes I was going to make next year. What I was actually doing was quietly forgetting every commitment I hadn't kept that year, then promising myself those same ones again with some new ones stacked on top. The ten extra pounds, the permanently distracted focus, the self-image that had started attacking me instead of supporting me, that was the slate I was starting from.

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