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iAlign #80 - Rejection Is Proof You Stopped Hesitating · The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to the I Align podcast with Flint Mitchell, where I provide stories, resources, and tools for ambitious builders who are ready to gain control over procrastination, overthinking, and distraction.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Several years back, I got rejected from MIT.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: It was a spot in a lab that was deeply aligned with my passion for studying the human mind.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll actually share with you the letter I wrote to the head of the lab before I applied if anyone's interested.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Shit.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'll share with you my application at the end of this too, if you're interested.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I thought it was a pretty good application.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: But before my mind blasts off in a million different directions because my passion surrounding this topic, let me make sure I walk you through this story linearly.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I have to be cautious with that because I'm an engineer and a scientist who is extremely curious, and I can dive deep on a myriad of topics.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I have to make sure I point my attention in the right direction, I'm sure you understand.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: The human brain has always fascinated me.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's filled with cells called neurons that create a flow of electrical signals called action potentials around our brains through electrical imbalances created from opening and closing the like little holes of each cell that allow for the movement of charged molecules in and out of each cell.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And in a very loose analogy, if you smile and compliment your friend, you allow for positive energy to flow to that friend.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, you maybe excite them to go out and pay a compliment to someone else.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they even compliment many people afterwards, sending that positivity far and wide.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes that compliment gets paid to a grump who shuts down and stops that flow of excitement.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: What a fucking douche.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: In university, I learned how to look at this signal both with physical circuits, but also through programs that modeled them.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: I built schematics for my own electroencephalogram, which is the machine with electrodes that measure brain waves, that got me interviews at some cool opportunities around the nation.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: I used a power supply in the university basement that I thought had the correct voltage, but because it was archaic, as much academic equipment is, the numbers were slightly ribbed off, and I think it would provide 10 or 100 times the amount of power I thought it would, and it just melted the fuck out of the board that I was building and turned straight to smoke, which was shocking to say the least.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyways, at this point in time, I'm frolicking around the earth with eight inches of hair, I think, studying electrical engineering, an absolute chick magnet, as you can imagine, and I'm falling in love with where my studies are meeting human physiology, electrical engineering, and the electrical circuitry of the human body.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sending handwritten letters to top professors whose books I read that I can almost guarantee you just threw them directly in the trash, if they even got to those professors.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing extra work on tests and assignments.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm auditing a class, doing it for free just to study on computational neuroscience.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: This one time I quite literally got extra credit on an exam in an upper-level medical signals class that wasn't even offered.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: I just kept working on a problem after it was finished because I thought it was rad, and the teacher was like, Yeah, this is cool.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you have extra credit?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Further establishing my role in the university at the top of the social hierarchy by acing an exam that everyone else failed.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I know.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm basically Ryan Reynolds in that movie where he never leaves college and is super rad.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And to be clear, I wasn't even a stellar student in every class.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not some prodig or anything like that.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm an extremely regular, intelligence dude who's just working really hard about things he's super passionate about.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: For example, I genuinely believe that anyone could study electrical engineering.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: The only thing that really makes people not do it is the people who already have pursued that field and tell everyone else not to because it's so hard in order to basically stroke their own ego and feel better about themselves.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Anyways, this fascination turns into medical school after university because I'm so passionate about the human brain, right?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe neurosurgery.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I go off on this tangent.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: I read all these books, I shadow doctors in the operating room, I volunteer in hospice care for a couple years with people who are actively dying.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: I take the MCAT surrounded by all these kids whose moms were basically holding their hands into the exam room, which was weird at 23 years old.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Anyways, I press submit on the MCAT and realize, oh fuck, it's not the brain I'm most interested in.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still interested in it, and it's physiology.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was just recognizing something important in that moment, which was it's the human mind, right?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: For my entire life, as far as I have loved being on my own and doing my own thing, I absolutely love the social world, right?
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: My eighth-grade teacher told me that I should turn the N in my name to an R, which spells flirt for those of you not following.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: I was my eighth grade teacher.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: And to his credit, he was certainly not wrong, right?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Chubby, pale little eighth grade me trying to flirt with girls is a comical and very real memory.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: But much more than this, I just genuinely enjoy intimacy with other people.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And get your mind out of the gutter.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Intimacy simply means genuine connection.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: If I am in a coffee shop or walking on the beach and you're reading the book, I think has an interesting cover, I'm gonna ask you about it.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And within five minutes, we will likely be talking about the insights you pulled from it, or the inspirations you're feeling in life right now, or the largest obstacles you faced over the last year, etc.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I just absolutely love this shit, right?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I've met and had conversations with old men who fought in far-off wars and old women who worked in the first machine learning labs in the world at Cafe Broni in Palo Alto, people whom I will never again talk to, or likely even remember their names.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: I've had so many wonderful positive interactions and continue to do so, interspersed with the less and positive ones.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: It turns out that if you ask a woman as you're passing by, just truly passing by, you get a good one while she's taking a selfie, she will in fact either smile and laugh at the joke as you walk on by or give you a genuine glare of fucking death to mind your own business.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's okay.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: It happens.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: To my point, however, what is it that makes people smile?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: What about frown?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Feel supported, attacked, proud, stressed, fulfilled.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: There are clear physiological stressors in uh psychological stimuli that have predictable results for each of these responses.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, everyone is unique.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, at least for now.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: It appears that the more everyone scrolls the same content and shares their problems and gets advice from ChatGPT, they're all turning into this homogeneous blob with a lack of focus, personality, and interests.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: But that's a topic for another time.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: The thing is, your mind and the way it's been conditioned, even if very similar to your best friend or your brother or your sister, is very different from theirs.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: You have your own core memories and triggers and urges and inspirations, and that is wonderful.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: More than wonderful is that it presents for an absolutely incredible field of study.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: One piece of that field of study is the field of affective computing, which is the name of the lab I got rejected to in MIT.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: That field deals with the computational analysis of human emotions.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: How can you write programs that understand and interpret and respond with and to emotion?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And to study this field inherently means you have to ask the question: how do you study emotions?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: You can't measure them like temperature with a thermometer.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just measure the electrical signals of the brain with 100% certainty, deuce what emotion is being felt, let alone why.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's a layer abstract from the physical experience in the human brain, right?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a manifestation of the hard problem of consciousness.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: It is part of one of my underlying missions in life to help research and help in this field.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Partly because I find it so genuinely interesting, and partly because this world is advancing quite rapidly, and there are a bunch of horrible fucking people on this planet who want to and are already trying to use these technologies to take advantage of other human beings.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to be a part of the good side of history that tells them to shove it up their fucking ass.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's like the genuine side of this.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: So this passion leads me to 2 a.m.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: in the morning on a red-eye flight to Boston and the affected computing conference in MIT with luggage falling out of the bins above us while we fly what appears to be through a tornado, literally the most horrific turbulence I've ever experienced.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: The woman next to me was actually tucked into the fetal position below her chair, and I put my hand on her shoulder and said, It's gonna be okay, ma'am.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: To which she looked up at me and responded, No, we're going to die.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Fortunately, she was incorrect.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, this did lead to a delusional, sleep-defrived version of me walking into the media lab on the MIT campus, suit on, bags under my eyes.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I quickly perked up as I wandered around and struck up conversations.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: I learned about what was going on.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: I talked with some of the smartest minds in this field, many of which who looked at my name tag and said, What's Ialine, which is my company?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Oh, it's a business I'm starting, to this.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't say they rolled their eyes, but I could tell I moved in their perception from possible prospective grad students slash slave in my lab or other esteemed scholar to some schmuck who just wants my attention.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm being a bit facetious.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: I did make some wonderful connections.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: I learned a lot.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: I got to talk to the head of the lab who would eventually reject me months later.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Third time I bring this rejection up, only for humorous effect.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: I have no negative feelings toward it.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the reality that I was finding as I walked around that conference was that in this moment, regardless of what the news sounds like, we're in a similar moment to when the internet was going widespread, or when social media platforms like Facebook were just going viral.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning there's a ton of potential in this world and lots of wonderful research.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also still the Wild West, where most of this potential is just theoretical and not experiential yet.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: And what that meant, for me, at least, is that if I wanted to pursue this dream of building technology that understands and supports human beings, I have to build it.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately Hemingway said it best, which is the first time you do anything is shit.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I learned software engineering from a friend of mine who recently exited from a successful app development consulting business in my free time.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Enough of it at least to build a software that I was interested in that would text you and listen to your responses and send simple check-ins based on your core values, interpret patterns, do some little statistical analyses, learn from you a bit from quick 60 second or last check-ins.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: But transparently, the product was kind of shit.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: I can admit that.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: My friends could too.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm still building the software behind the scenes.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: It will come back.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I had to pivot away from it to make sure I was actually building the right thing, not just something that I wanted to build.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I took the core value-based system that I had developed in my own life for creating high-level performance and baked that into a methodology others could use.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And right now, I use that to support clients individually and in groups in order to implement that system while in the shadows behind the scenes working on my larger, many decades-long mission.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Building.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: While you're listening to this, that's probably what I'm doing.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm probably writing or learning or talking or exploring or adventuring or building.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it's really intimidating.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: I have a vision that I can barely put into words.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's so large.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's really fucking frustrating.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: I have to learn and implement certain skills like marketing and advertising, which now I think are interesting and cool, but had no experience or desire to experience beforehand.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Fields I know will also never be my expertise.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And they aren't how I want to be spending my time.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also not good at them, which sucks, right?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because I want to be spending my time on the things I'm good at, but it's necessary for the business.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's exhausting.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: I still take on contracts in the data science world to keep my programming and engineering skills sharp for when I get back into the heavier research and engineering and science world of this mission.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's a lot of time.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it makes me feel pretty small because I'm constantly taking on new roles and projects and doing things that I have no experience in.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the first 10 or 100 times, there's shit.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: I do it, I just do it poorly because I don't know what I'm doing yet.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it takes iterations in order to know what you're doing.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it triggers my insecurity.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: I could have taken a secure or steady role as an engineer or a scientist at some big company or startup and had a nice little salary with a nice little apartment and smiled on the outside while I allowed my personal dreams and goals to slowly go silent.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I do all of this while constantly battered by the same distractions of the world and of self just like you.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm truly not special or perfect at all.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: I just figured out how to eliminate lots of noise in this world from many common triggers like social media, news, guilt traps, relationships, etc., and turn that time into focused work toward my mission.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: I just make consistent progress, regardless of the outcome that awaits me on this journey.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that is what I support people to do using their core values as their central guiding post.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, while I build the foundation of this chapter of my life, where I support remarkable individuals to overcome the negative feedback loops of distraction and procrastination and hesitation and self-doubt into positive ones of consistent action, focus, clarity, and confidence, I found freedom.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: I spend my time the way that I want.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: I face the risks of the world and of going my way the best I can.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: I wake up early and just keep going because I'm so genuinely passionate about what I'm doing.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: And while I explore the world, I want my life to be immersed in the physiology and psychology and sociology and neuroscience and signals and patterns of the human experience.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: I want to both support and study the lives of millions, if not billions, of people on this planet in a way that puts a wall in between them and those who want to use these technologies for harm.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: My core values gave me the freedom to pursue these goals with a level of passion that I read about in books and saw in movies, but never saw in person or in myself.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And your core values can give you that same freedom to take consistent action toward your value-aligned goals, regardless of the risk or the emotion.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that you can look back at the rejections you faced and the shit first drafts of projects you built and laugh because they led to the success in the final editions of the goals you did achieve and the masterpieces you did create.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: So that you can live life your own way through consistent action and confidence in yourself and with freedom.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And when I look back now at rejections that I faced in my life, I look at them all as sources of opportunity because they were the result of an action that I took that allowed me to either sit and hesitate and not take action or to iterate again.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the more that I iterate again in a value-aligned direction, the more confident I become, the more clear I am, the more consistent I am, and the more free I am.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed that episode.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you've been told your entire life that you're smart and you have potential, but you continue to see yourself not do what you said you would do again and again, and it's made you stop trusting in yourself or that you will ever achieve that potential, I want to help you.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Together, you and I will implement a core value-based system that will help you become decisive and focused.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to feel the relief from the weight on your shoulders because of the decreased noise in your head.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Strength each morning because you trust yourself to turn lost avoidant hours of your life into forward progress.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Peace, when you no longer have to hide how you actually spend your time.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, pride in yourself when you close your eyes every night before you go to sleep.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: If that's of interest to you, click the first link in the show notes, fill out the 30 second application, and grab a time on my calendar.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Spots are obviously limited because of my time and availability, but if they fill up and you're a good fit, I'll make sure you get on the wait list.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to speaking with you.