Latest / The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell / iAlign #77 - It Is 5:53, You Will Stop At Six

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iAlign #77 - It Is 5:53, You Will Stop At Six · 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: I would tell you that I remember when I realized I was addicted to my electronics, but transparently, I had that realization so many times in my life that I'm not sure which of those memories I would even tell you about.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because from an early age, a very early age, I recognized that my electronics had a hold on me.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And from a very early age, I then tried to separate from them.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I failed repeatedly, like non-stop until I was about 25 years old and took control over it.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I would love to sit here and tell you, oh no, it's not me.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I've just always had control over how I use my my electronics and social media.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm not one of those silly people who can't put YouTube down.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be lying to your face.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And sure, I had plenty of moments when I was growing up and through that age where I spent the vast majority of my time off my electronics.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Or wait, is that is that even true?
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Or did the electronics just change?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because if I think about it, it started with video games or Super Mario Sunshine, Kirby, Star Fox 64, RuneScape, the Zelda games, etc.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Don't get me wrong, I loved a lot of these video games.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: I have legitimate core memories of beating the final bosses with friends.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Or TV show series because our parents needed breaks, turned into TV shows because that's how I wanted to spend my time now at 13.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Or AIM chats and video calls late into the night, or watching YouTube.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And shit, don't like, don't even get me started on YouTube.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure how I did anything else in seventh grade.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: I remember watching an entire made-up series based on the Halo game that had some inappropriate commentary.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was called Red vs.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Blue.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: I never even played Halo.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was just addicted to YouTube or texting on the first generation of iPhones.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Man, getting a text from my middle school crush.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: So you're such a nice guy with a little smiley face.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: As if I didn't want more of those notifications on my phone that made me feel that way.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: I remember playing StarCraft 2 and League of Legends for a moment at the end of high school.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't even like those games.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was just something that I did with friends outside of school and soccer.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe up until this point, this all seems a bit juvenile and fun.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, you get into college and you basically need an Instagram and Facebook to connect with all the groups on campus, know where the parties are, those kind of things.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And for brevity, let me just hit you with some honorable mentions that I can remember off the top of my head.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: We also have switching from GameCube to a PS3 and playing Call of Duty 4 on Modern Warfare.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: We have Pokemon on my Game Boy Color.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: We have Age of Empires or Age of War, if you remember that that web browser game.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: We have watching Friends with my older brother, Snapchat Streaks with some girl I thought that I really liked in high school, yik yak, quite literally the worst modern creation of humanity.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I'm gonna stop.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's getting excessive.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, I left out some big hitters with the intro to TikTok and dating apps, but you get the point.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: The technology's changed, but the addiction pattern was the same.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: The need to consume information and the lack of spending time the way that I truly wanted to.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: I spent a metric fuck ton of my life online and not spent taking action in the real world, starting at a very early age.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And for a long time, I genuinely thought there was something quite wrong with me because I had all these aspirations to go and do all these remarkable things.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to play D1 soccer, climb mountains, learn to surf, match my older brother's perfect grades, all that stuff.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And don't get me wrong, I also had a fantastic childhood and youth.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: I still managed to do some really cool shit through my early 20s.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: The reality check just comes when I realize how much potential I left on the table because of my addiction to my electronics.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't even mention porn, but obviously throw that one in there too, as if these things didn't limit my potential and my maturation when I was younger.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I look back on many of the memories that I just spoke about in a funny way, both with fondness, but also with disgust.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Many of those were happy memories in the moment.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: I can vivid remember the Super Mario Sunshine Bowser Boss.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: But they were also probably not how I wanted to actually spend that time when we got into college.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking about the amount of time spent scrolling on YouTube, it probably wasn't how I genuinely wanted to spend that time.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was just easy.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it took a shit ton of work, investment of time, investment of money, transparently, to understand how I could actually eliminate this addiction in my life.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: It took a lot of failures.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if I think about it, each one of those failures probably correlates to one of those times I mentioned at the start of this where I was like, oh, I realized I was addicted to this.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: I read a statistic recently that said that the average user of social media spends about two and a half hours per day on it, which ends up with some quick math being just under a thousand hours per year.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's actually a lot more than that.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Transparently, for me, I look back on those pivotal years of my life, and it was a lot more than two and a half hours a day, which means that if I calculated out, a thousand hours a year times 10 years means I probably wasted about 10,000 hours of my life in my teens and my early 20s.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that sucks to say out loud.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is one of the reasons why I always felt a bit behind and a bit insecure and embarrassed just about myself in general, because simply put, I wasn't in control of my own actions.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And once again, don't get me wrong.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: I went to a rad university.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: I studied cool shit.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: I got a great job.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: I have some patents.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: I explored the world during these years.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: I dated, I played high-level soccer through university, all that.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Life was good and I was happy, but it certainly wasn't fucking great.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I may have smiled a lot, but I also doubted myself a hell of a lot more.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's difficult to not doubt yourself when you can't trust that you won't procrastinate the next thing you commit to because you genuinely aren't sure if you have control over yourself.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: If you'll claim that you're going to work and study long hours, but then those hours are actually just the night before the test, because the rest of the time you just wasted your time online scrolling some bullshit.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And now, years after having control over this stuff in my life, I want to let you in on an embarrassing secret, which is that the cravings to go back and just scroll my phone, they come back, right?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: In a certain way.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because not only have the large tech companies made it so effortless to just slide right into an hour-long bullshit binge of useless information or little more than numbing content online.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: My brain has been conditioned from a very early age to crave that stimulation as well.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I would be straight up lying to you if I told you, oh no, just do X, Y, and Z, stand up on your left foot, put a filter on your phone, say the magic words, swipe your credit card, and voila, no more electronics addiction.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: I may have identified and eliminated many of the urges that led me to engage with my electronics in my life, but I certainly haven't eliminated them all.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: They will, for the rest of my life, come back through the random little triggers stuck somewhere in my brain, just waiting to come out.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's the loss of a loved one, maybe it's holiday isolation or sadness, maybe it's a breakup, maybe it's work stress or anxiety, health issues, like big things, right?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Any of these things that could spring up at any time and hit some really, you know, resonate with some really intense emotion.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then that emotion turns into, hey Flint, remember this video game you played in third grade?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you go find an emulator online and go play it?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Or this YouTube creator you thought was so funny in seventh grade, or that Instagram account of that girl you thought was really hot in university.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And these things might seem trivial to you.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: None of them individually are horrible satanic feats, but that's the thing, is this addiction isn't generally seen through large atrocities against self.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's waged in thousands and thousands of small cuts.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's the, oh, it's 5.53 p.m.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just use Instagram until 6 p.m.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'll get back to that thing I was doing.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Then you blink and it's oh fuck, it's 2 a.m.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of hate myself right now because I haven't stopped.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Every single time you do that, it's a little cut and they accumulate.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Each slip back into compulsively scrolling your phone leads to hours or days, weeks, shit, maybe months or a year or two of your life sucked out of your soul.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And believe me, I get it.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: The only reason I have these specific examples is because I have lived this.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: I also work with people on a daily basis that are overcoming these same struggles.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the reasons I'm so passionate about this.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: But the thing about this conditioning, though, is that it isn't actually a lifelong sentence.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Just because I will continue to have urges that might show up randomly in my life doesn't mean I will continue to engage in them.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And slowly they will stop showing up, just as they have for many and many of those urges.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because whenever a new one comes up, I catalog it in the back of my mind or in my journal or in a meditation, and I think, oh, that was interesting.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: That made me want to scroll my phone a bit.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was the anxiousness I'm feeling or the insecurity associated with that event.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't I walk through a quick dialogue about that event in my journal so I can nip it in the bud?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then just like that, that urge is booked in the back of my head, and I'm ready for it the next time.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And likely after the next couple times it comes up, and I move through it successfully, it won't come up anymore.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And slowly but surely each urge is cataloged and prepared for and eliminated.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what's crazy?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: You actually forget about them.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Life changes, it becomes more peaceful and quiet, even when there is chaos.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because the chaos in the world, which there's lots of right now, is coming from the external world, the external world, the external source is not your internal one.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the shame or embarrassment or insecurity or self-doubt of realizing that you failed once again to create boundaries around your electronics, or to not procrastinate because of them, or not feel so less than because of the people online you compare yourself with, it starts to go away.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Really, it does.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: For example, I haven't woken up and just went on Instagram in I can't even remember how long.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: I genuinely can't even remember the last time I just woke up and just started scrolling Instagram.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't get that urge anymore.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, I sit with myself on a meditation net or in my journal, or I talk to someone, or I go and I sit what I'm doing right now, and I just watch clouds move in the sky and birds chirp and and wind, you know, rustle through the grass.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: These are things that I really enjoy.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: They're calm ways of starting the morning, and they're ways that I have replaced those behaviors in my life that used to be there.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: My point of that is just the way you are living right now can change.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: You can do it.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And quite quickly and surely, instead of learning how to just move through these urges, you start spending time the way you want to, like I just mentioned.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: You aren't thinking about putting your phone down.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: You've forgotten that it's been down for a while.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And whatever is in front of you, whether it's your friends, it's your girl, a mountain, a wave, your business, it has your full attention.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: What seems like management of your behavior actually turns into its elimination.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: You look back and you blink and you think, holy shit, I haven't spent any time doing that thing that used to keep me up every single night.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if you listen this far, you're probably waiting for me to say something like, and I can help you do that for just$29.99 with my new AI app.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: No, sure, I have a business that I run, but sometimes I just want to share with you a personal part of my story.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because although I have overcome so much of this behavior in my life, it will always be a part of me.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the electronics of this world are only becoming more noisy and more addictive and more chaotic.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: The chaos and the noise is only increasing.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to offer you a little bit of peace right here, which is that you aren't locked into what feels like endless scrolling and negative emotions from it.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: You and I are made of the same flesh and blood and bone.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And transparently, if I haven't already made it clear from the stories I've told, like this was real for me.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: I was very likely in the exact same position you might be in right now, or potentially worse.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And nowadays, I spend the vast majority of my days working on my passions, reading, waking up early, surfing, hiking, being present with loved ones, building my own business, doing things that I aspired to do when I was younger, except for the D1 soccer.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think that opportunity has passed.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you're watching this right now, I'm probably doing one of those things.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that might not be the life that you want to live, but I do know you have a dream life.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's finishing a passion project that you've completed 90% of, but you can't get across the finish line because you keep hesitating, or starting the business you really want to pursue.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's getting in shape.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's climbing Mount Shasta.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Do it.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's fucking rad.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's putting yourself in a position to find the type of girl or guy you really want as a partner, but maybe aren't right now capable of attracting.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you want those things, but you're just not spending the necessary time to really get to that place because you spend too much time consuming stuff online or just in general, right?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is technically about electronics, but it's more generally about consuming instead of creating.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you want that life of creation and presence and calm and not consumption and anxiety and noise, it's available for you too.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Peace.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed that episode.
• 13:20
  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.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Together, you and I will implement a core value-based system that will help you become decisive and focused.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to feel the relief from the weight on your shoulders because of the decreased noise in your head.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Strength each morning because you trust yourself to turn lost avoidant hours of your life into forward progress.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Peace, when you no longer have to hide how you actually spend your time.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, pride in yourself when you close your eyes every night before you go to sleep.
• 14:04
  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.
• 14:12
  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.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to speaking with you.