Latest / The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell / iAlign #86 - Nobody Is Waiting For The Thing You're Polishing

Transcript

iAlign #86 - Nobody Is Waiting For The Thing You're Polishing · 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: The fear of being seen as imperfect and the desire to build something that actually matters are roads pointed in opposite directions.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: You only get to walk toward one of them, right?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I was doing some research the other day on Instagram because for the life of me, I still can't figure out how to get my message out there effectively.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I will, don't worry.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: But I write long form essays, not short, choppy, viral clips.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm still understanding how to best convey the message of Ireland in a way that connects with the modern scroller, right?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when I need to improve on something, I never isolate in the shadows, trying to be perfect all on my own.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I go out and I look for help.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: So as I'm doing this Instagram research, a video slides across my screen of this music producer named Russ.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not in the know, he's a big producer, he has billions of streams.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he's talking about a song that he put out about four or five years ago that went platinum, hitting numbers most artists chase their whole lives and never chuch.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing he said next is what actually stopped me.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: He explained that people still discover this famous song of his today, four years later, and messaged him saying things like, Wow, this is fire.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, as if the song had just come out yesterday.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Once again, it had tens, if not hundreds of millions of streams already.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: He admitted it drives him a little bit crazy, not just because he thinks about that song every single day of his life.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: He probably hears a piece of that song every single day as well.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: As it seems like millions of other people do too.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: So how on earth could someone not know it exists?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then he landed on the obvious thing, which all of us seem to forget, is that other people don't live inside our heads the way that we do.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: They caught his song for a few seconds while they were scrolling, somewhere between a cooking video and their ex's story on Instagram, and they went right on with their day.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: He is the main character of his life, just like you're the main character of yours, but he has barely a background extra in theirs.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll be honest with you, when I first heard that, it reminded me of my former self and of a belief I carried around for most of my life, which is if you build something good and impactful, people will come and appreciate it and use it.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you build it, they will come.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: That is what I grew up believing.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: It is romantic and it is nice and it is also bullshit.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because that belief quietly sells you on a fantasy.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: It tells you that if you were to write the most beautiful essay or build the most incredible invention, you could keep it tucked away on your laptop or sitting on your kitchen table, quietly working on it, polishing it in private until it becomes so perfect that no one could ever resist it or put it down.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then, so the story goes, the moment one person finally got their hands on it, it would be so undeniably great that they would pass it along to everyone else in their life, who would pass it along to everyone else in theirs until the last person it could help was possibly using it.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's a beautiful little fantasy.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: It also is the exact thing that keeps your best work collecting dust.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let me show you what I mean with something small from my own life.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's this little sushi spot right next to my old apartment in San Francisco, and it is hands down one of my favorites in the entire city.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Atomi Sushi on Lombard.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Go check it out.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's run by a wife and husband.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: She does all the waiting, he makes all the sushi.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's great.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you asked me for a recommendation in San Francisco, I would send you there without a hesitation.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: I literally just did it, right?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, if I'm being completely truthful with you, I have never once thought about that place out of my own volition, like on my own, when I wasn't standing in front of it or thinking about dinner.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't because I don't love it.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: I really do.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's simply that I am busy doing the main character stuff of my own life in the exact way that you are in yours.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And in that same way, every person on your email list or in your audience or potential audience is in their own heads.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: No one is sitting at home refreshing the page and waiting for your or my work.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that is not a knock on you or on me at all.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's just the honest reality of being a human being with your own life playing out at full volume.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now I can already hear a few of you saying this.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, Flint, that's fine for the stuff that doesn't matter, but mine actually needs to be good.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not about to put out garbage.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I hear you, I completely do, because neither am I.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the reality.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: When people listen to the bad songs, they just move on and go on with their life and listen to the other ones.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Even if it's so bad that it pisses them off, they forget about it because they have to get to work or hit a deadline or someone walks by and they lose their train of thought.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Think about your favorite music artist.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: I can basically guarantee you that they have some shit songs that you press next on every time they come up and yet you still listen to their good ones.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Or Tiger Woods, arguably the greatest player to ever pick up a golf low.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's an interview of him where someone asks him how many shots around does he actually flush the golf ball?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning, like, how many times does it come off exactly the way he pictured it, perfectly in his mind?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And his answer is two out of 70, maybe.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: 98% of the greatest golfer alive shots were not the shot that he wanted.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And yet he still went on to win everything.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So sit with that for a second, right?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because it quietly takes the whole story apart.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: The bar was never to make the perfect thing.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's not how you get to the place you want to get to.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: The bar is to intentionally set yourself up as best as you can in the limited amount of time you have to take the shot, to miss most of them, the way that every single person who has ever done anything great also misses, and then to keep moving.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because not every shot is going to be on the highlight reel.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: But if you don't take any shots, you have no fucking highlight reel.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you do not need the next piece of your project to be the shot.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: You just need to hit it.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you exactly what happens when you wait for perfect instead, because I have lived inside that loop for months at a time, as I can basically guarantee that you have as well.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: You don't publish the work, you don't ship the code or the project or have the conversation, and because you don't publish or ship or speak up, you never get that small piece of feedback or momentum or reward that would have made the next one better.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And because nothing got better, the imaginary crowd in your head gets a little louder, so you retreat a little further, and another quiet week goes by where the best version of your work lived and died inside your own skull.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: That is a trap.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: It is the trap.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: And notice that the way out of it is not a better idea or a more polished draft.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: The way out of it is the exact thing I'm doing with this video, as I do with every single video, because I'm pretty shit at the social media game still, even after easily a thousand videos posted.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm not hiding and trying to figure it all out in the dark.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Don't for a moment think that I couldn't rewrite what I'm talking about right now a hundred more times and try to make it better.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: But that won't push me along.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: There are pieces of it that I feel aren't great, but here it is in front of you because I researched, iterated, asked for help, and let the imperfect version of my message live in the world while I work on making it better in real time.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole game.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it brings me to your real issue, which is that the thought of being seen as imperfect or bad at what you do leads you to overthink, seek out distraction instead of action, and then make no or very little progress.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because the moment you actually put the thing out there in the world, like this video is sitting in front of you right now, you lose the safety of it's not ready yet.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: It is out there now with your name attached to it, and people can finally look at it, which means they can finally look at you or me and go, wow, Flint, you look fucking stupid saying all this bullshit.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Who do you think you are?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: They might decide that I'm a fraud or you're a fraud.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Flint, you're such a fraud.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: They might think, who does this person think they are?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Which is very likely the exact voice you have already rehearsed in your own head a hundred thousand times.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: So you keep it tucked away, where it stays perfect and unjudged forever, and where it also helps precisely no one and also doesn't end up perfect at all.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: But being seen was the entire point.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Not like from an ego place, but like the work has to be seen, it has to impact.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And your work cannot reach or change or impact or help a single human being while it's hidden down in the foundation, protecting you from a crowd that, as we have already covered, is not even watching it, right?
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because they can't.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: The fear of being seen and the desire to build something that actually matters are roads pointed in opposite directions, and you only get to walk toward one of them.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: I know which one I'm choosing.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Imperfect essays and videos and all.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: So here's my one small ass for you.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Just hit reply, drop a comment, tell me something that you've been sitting on.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: The post, the project, the offer, the piece of writing, you keep quietly polishing off in the shadows.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: I read every comment, every response, every DM, and I would love to get back to you.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Peace.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed that episode.
• 8:33
  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.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Together, you and I will implement a core value-based system that will help you become decisive and focused.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to feel the relief from the weight on your shoulders because of the decreased noise in your head.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Strength each morning because you trust yourself to turn lost avoidant hours of your life into forward progress.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Peace, when you no longer have to hide how you actually spend your time.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, pride in yourself when you close your eyes every night before you go to sleep.
• 9:18
  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.
• 9:25
  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.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to speaking with you.