Seeking Authenticity with Flint Mitchell

Send us Fan Mail 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,...

Send us Fan Mail 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 te...

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 wer...

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 p...

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 unc...

Send us Fan Mail I'd wake up with a list, exercise, ten hours of work, meditate, surf, and then I'd blink and it was 5:30 and I'd done almost none of it. That would turn into me lying in bed at one in the morning as a grown adult, playing the old Miniclip games I played when I was twelve, and the thing is my face in those moments wasn't happy, it was numb. What I eventually wor...

Send us Fan Mail I was doing bioinformatics work for a biotech group with a big analysis due by the end of the year, and I was badly behind on it. Then they asked me to write something up for a scientific presentation, which was far less work, and I poured myself into that instead and let the main project sit. It did two things for me and neither one was honest. It let me act overwhelmed, like I h...

Send us Fan Mail I get lonely over the holidays sometimes, no matter how many people around me love me. One year I was having a rough stretch, not feeling appreciated or checked in on, and I watched some rage bait video on Instagram saying other people never reach out first, so just test them by going quiet for a week. I took that on, and two things happened. Because I was already looking for the...

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...

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...

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...

Send us Fan Mail I started a blog in university called Trying to Tech and never made it past post number four. It sat there for years as one more open tab, which is really what this one is about. Every project you start and abandon takes up memory whether you're working on it or not. You don't feel behind because you're doing too little. You feel behind because you're carrying...

Send us Fan Mail I've tracked my drinking for a few years now. Last year I averaged around 15 a month, this year it's closer to five, and every Thanksgiving and Christmas it roughly doubles and leaves me foggy for a week afterward. That's not really a story about alcohol. It's about noticing. You can't change a pattern you've never measured, and telling yourself you&a...

Send us Fan Mail My New Year's kiss a couple years ago was a bottle of NyQuil. I was sick in bed on January 1st and my mind was still telling me I was lazy, I was behind, I should be doing something. That's the trap for ambitious people. In the moment you most need your head on your side, it turns on you instead. This one gets into why resilience is mostly preparation rather than willpow...

Send us Fan Mail I was sitting in a power systems class when the email came through with my organic chemistry score, and I'm pretty sure it started with a two. I ran across campus in flip flops to ask the TA if there'd been a mistake. There hadn't. The thing is I had studied hard, in the only way I knew how. Go at one thing intensely, drop everything else, get overwhelmed, blow up,...

Send us Fan Mail I used to lie to people about the books I was reading, not outright, just by naming books I'd started and never finished whenever someone asked what I did with my weekend. What was really going on is that I'd overcommitted to so many things that I never had the time to finish any of them. There was a Saturday in September, a beautiful crisp fall day with the swell starti...

Send us Fan Mail When I lived in Santa Cruz there was a route I'd start driving without ever deciding to. Down to the water, past Pleasure Point, over to Cat & Cloud to work, because I was supposedly trying to be in a more productive environment. I'd sit there and act like I was working while my actual output sat on the floor. One afternoon like that is harmless. Three months of it a...

Send us Fan Mail I was standing with my dad around Christmas a few years ago thinking, I wish I was moving faster, I wish I was more proud of myself, I don't even know if I'm on the right track. What bothered me most wasn't being behind. It was that I wasn't taking the actions that would have told me either way. This one is about why the stretch from September to December decid...

Send us Fan Mail I had a lab, a full set of equipment, and afternoons I could spend on whatever experiment I wanted. I spent them scrolling the Instagram of a girl I knew in high school, telling myself I'd start at one, then two, then three thirty. By the time someone asked about happy hour I'd say yes just to stop thinking about the afternoon I'd wasted. Two things were actually go...

Send us Fan Mail The Count of Monte Cristo was one of my favorite books growing up and I think it did some damage. I loved the idea of disappearing into the shadows for years and coming back finished, and I treated that as the honorable way to do things. It isn't. Doing everything the hard way is usually just avoidance masked as morality. I had a client at a satellite company who was about to...

Send us Fan Mail Click Here to join the iAlign Effort Advantage™ Case Study and build a level of consistent focus like you've never experienced. --- Spotify Podcasts Apple Podcasts Links: Instagram : @ialign.flintmitchell iAlign Website : https://www.ialign.app Personal Website and Book : https://www.flintmitchell.com TikTok @flint.mitchell Youtube @ialign Email: ialign@ialign.app ©Flint Mitc...

Send us Fan Mail Click Here to join the iAlign Effort Advantage™ Case Study and build a level of consistent focus like you've never experienced. --- Spotify Podcasts Apple Podcasts Links: Instagram : @ialign.flintmitchell iAlign Website : https://www.ialign.app Personal Website and Book : https://www.flintmitchell.com TikTok @flint.mitchell Youtube @ialign Email: ialign@ialign.app ©Flint Mitc...

Send us Fan Mail Click Here to join the iAlign Effort Advantage™ Case Study and build a level of consistent focus like you've never experienced. --- Spotify Podcasts Apple Podcasts Links: Instagram : @ialign.flintmitchell iAlign Website : https://www.ialign.app Personal Website and Book : https://www.flintmitchell.com TikTok @flint.mitchell Youtube @ialign Email: ialign@ialign.app ©Flint Mitc...

Send us Fan Mail Click Here to join the iAlign Effort Advantage™ Case Study and build a level of consistent focus like you've never experienced. --- Spotify Podcasts Apple Podcasts Links: Instagram : @ialign.flintmitchell iAlign Website : https://www.ialign.app Personal Website and Book : https://www.flintmitchell.com TikTok @flint.mitchell Youtube @ialign Email: ialign@ialign.app ©Flint Mitc...

Send us Fan Mail Click Here to join the iAlign Effort Advantage™ Case Study and build a level of consistent focus like you've never experienced. --- Spotify Podcasts Apple Podcasts Links: Instagram : @ialign.flintmitchell iAlign Website : https://www.ialign.app Personal Website and Book : https://www.flintmitchell.com TikTok @flint.mitchell Youtube @ialign Email: ialign@ialign.app ©Flint Mitc...