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iAlign #87 - Thursday You Keeps Beating Monday You · 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.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: What is up?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: 2 30 in the afternoon, just making a coffee, just surfed, having a good Saturday.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And something came to mind, which I want to talk about, which is that alignment is greater than discipline.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: You've tried being more disciplined, right?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't work, does it?
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's the Thursday U versus the Monday U every single week.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And Thursday keeps winning.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's not to say that discipline isn't important, it's a wonderful core value.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that when we try to be disciplined, we do it with a backwards approach.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: So let me walk you through a different, more effective methodology.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: In order to build discipline, let's not even talk about it to start.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start somewhere almost nobody starts before they just grind themselves into the fucking ether.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that is alignment, the concept of alignment.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: To do this, let me walk you through a lesson that I learned through a man who rewired effectively how I think about it.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: My high school physics teacher used to work at a top secret government defense contractor company that was right next to my high school.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: He couldn't talk about what he did, but I assume he was building the like lasers that Dr.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Evil was putting on his sharks and Austin Powers or some shit like that.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Real deal, badge access, the kind of job you're supposed to want, secret, you know, rad science job.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And one day he quit and he walked across the street and he took a job teaching physics to teenagers.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, I asked him, why did you do that?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer was pretty amusing.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: He said that he'd been watching The End of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Indiana Jones, one of the best movies out there, in my opinion.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the scene where they finally get to the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred biblical wooden chest plated in gold built by the ancient Hebrews that held the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, or otherwise known as the pretty gold box that shoots lightning and spirits out of it, killing everyone who looks, making Elon's rockets look pretty silly, if you ask me.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you were to imagine this was a real pretty box with real pretty lightning and real spirits that really shoot out and kill everyone in the vicinity, then you would imagine that this would be considered a fairly important discovery, something that everyone would want to get their hands on to study or to use.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: But in the last scene of the movie, a government or a military official or worker, whoever it is, nails it into a plain wooden crate, completely unassuming, and wheels it into a warehouse with a million identical crates, and it's just gone, packed up, likely to never be seen again.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so, as my teacher said he was watching this, he thought to himself, I don't want my life's work to end up as a big box in some government warehouse.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: So he walked across the street and became a physics teacher.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a fantastic example of one component of a definition of alignment.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: After that, he showed up every day, worked hard, taught with energy and excitement and experiments, and likely inspired many, including myself, to be more engaged in physics, if not just science and problem solving in general.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Alignment is not the world's scoreboard.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a prestigious job.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Don't worry, I'll touch on that in a second because I know you won't like that.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a round of funding or the title that your parents can brag about at dinner.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Alignment is when your actual actions match your actual values with your own unique definitions of them.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason that it matters so much for you specifically is this: you don't revert from things that are rooted in your values.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: You revert from things that aren't.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: When something is genuinely rooted in who you are, you come back to it even after you fall off.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: The way you come back to a person you genuinely love after a fight.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same concept.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have clarity over what your values look like in practice, you can't consciously or unconsciously know where to revert back to, and you end up in cycles of distraction or overthinking or avoidance.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is why you don't bounce back like a rubber band.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Without a clear definition of alignment and the right tools, it can take you a long time to find your way back to your values.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: You can see this experience in the years-long fights you have with yourself to remove bad habits or behaviors that you've been engaging in forever.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: This fight is you trying to revert back to your values just without proper support to expedite the process.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: When something is unrooted and has no clear association with your definition of alignment, which is usually the case if you don't have one, then you drift away from it.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the second motivation runs out, you just beat yourself up for drifting.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's this endless negative feedback loop cycle.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Point that I alluded to earlier.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: This doesn't mean that elite jobs or money or big creative projects, rounds of funding for your startup, et cetera, aren't important.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: It means that any one of them can be the most aligned pursuit in your entire life as long as the route is actually yours, as long as it's actually aligned with your values.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: The prestigious job isn't the enemy, far from it.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Chasing the prestigious job because some part of you believes it'll finally make you feel like enough without ever once asking whether you actually want it.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: That is the enemy.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: The funding you raise to build the specific thing that you can't stop thinking about is alignment.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: But the exact same funding raised so you can stop feeling behind everyone else that you graduated with is just paint on the box that the ARC sat in and went into the government warehouse.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: The object isn't inherently the problem.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it's genuinely rooted in your core values is.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And what is the product of the day-to-day fight to maintain focus toward underlying goals?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Avoidance, overthinking, distraction, cleaning your apartment on Tuesday afternoon when you should be working, fabricating the progress you've made to your boss or colleague or friends because you weren't consistent, opening up a new tab and starting a shiny new project.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: How would you qualify these behaviors in reflection?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: They are a lack of discipline.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: What's actually going on is that you have never actually stopped to define what your aligned life even looks like.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: So you're grinding toward a version of success that you absorbed from everyone else or were conditioned to believe was important and never once checked against yourself.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: That definition of alignment is the tool.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not sexy and it's not a hack.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's defining your core values and getting brutally specific about what alignment looks like for you.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: So that when you sit down to work, you are showing up with a reason for being there.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Not everyone would make the same decision as my physics professor.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: The pay or the opportunity to work on novel technologies may be more aligned for you, and that's cool.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the point, though.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: The point is that by defining alignment in your own life allows for you to change your frame and to stop needing to shame yourself in emotion because you're returning to something that's actually yours.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Peace.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed that episode.
• 6:44
  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.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Together, you and I will implement a core value-based system that will help you become decisive and focused.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to feel the relief from the weight on your shoulders because of the decreased noise in your head.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Strength each morning because you trust yourself to turn lost avoidant hours of your life into forward progress.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Peace, when you no longer have to hide how you actually spend your time.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, pride in yourself when you close your eyes every night before you go to sleep.
• 7:29
  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.
• 7:36
  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.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to speaking with you.