Seeking Authenticity with Flint Mitchell

Send us Fan Mail 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 peo...

Send us Fan Mail 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 someon...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

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 overw...

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 s...

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...

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...

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. Y...

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...

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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 t...

Send us Fan Mail 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 tho...

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...

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...

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 be...

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 d...

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...

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&ap...

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 i...

Send us Fan Mail 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 he...

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 t...

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 m...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

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 Ya...

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 fo...