Ep. 70: Paul B. Allen, The Seven-Time Entrepreneur Driven to Personalize Life to Your Strengths and Talents
Paul B. Allen, a self-proclaimed “accidental entrepreneur,” dedicates his life to realizing people’s potential. In 1996, Allen founded Ancestry.com in an effort to connect people to their past. His previous work with Infobases and MyFamily helped cultivate his love for positive, mission-driven work. In 2002, he was introduced to the Clifton family, StrengthsFinder, and Gallup, the global analytics firm partnered with CliftonStrengths. Allen worked with Gallup for five years as a Senior Advisor and built his understanding of strength-oriented work and its benefits to office culture, productivity, and interpersonal relationships. He is now the Founder and CEO of Soar, a Gallup affiliate company. Soar matches strength coaches, who train people in performance and accountability through positivity, with clients all around the world. Allen strives to live out Soar’s mission statement, “Uplift Humanity.” See Allen speak about Soar and its mission in this video.
More on Paul B. Allen
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paulallenthelesser/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulballen/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/paulballen
SOAR Website: https://get.soar.com/
Gallup Website: https://www.gallup.com/home.aspx
Books Mentioned
Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements: https://www.amazon.com/Wellbeing-Essential-Elements-Tom-Rath/dp/1531865305
StrengthsFinder 2.0: https://www.amazon.com/StrengthsFinder-2-0-Tom-Rath/dp/159562015X
How Full is Your Bucket?: https://www.amazon.com/How-Full-Your-Bucket-Rath/dp/1595620036
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Show Notes
[00:19] Paul is an entrepreneur at least seven times over, and what we want you to know about Paul, is that these words are important: learner, input, ideation, intellection and strategic.
[02:16] I love learning more than I can even possibly describe it.
[03:34] And from that point on, I realized how much I love data and information on the computer. And providing all the world's best information at your fingertips kind of became a
mission.
[03:47] I started my first company, which was called Infobases, and our mission was to digitize all the best books ever written in every field of human knowledge and make them accessible on CD- RAM so that people could have these incredible libraries in their home.
[04:20] Learner/input is a classic combination for a lot of people in education.
[04:41] Do all your ventures have a positive mission?
[04:43] Almost all the companies had a very important mission to either provide information and learning or to connect and strengthen families or to help people discover their heritage.
[05:38] I mean, when I know you, I think of Ancestry.com. Is that how you think about it?
[05:43] Clearly being fortunate enough to be at the beginning of the Internet and being the first real successful company to put genealogy and family trees on the Internet. And that was super mission driven.
[06:32] And those of us who have family trees find incredible value and fulfillment in understanding our connection to the past.
[06:42] So I actually had a dream one night that we built websites for families, living families, where you could share photos and connect with your relatives all across the world, with your living relatives. And as soon as we started sharing that concept, we launched a website called myfamily.com.
[07:54] Well, I heard one of your guests, David Rubenstein, say that you learn so much more from failure and that almost no one can succeed without significant failure along the way. So that really resonates with me. Those huge setbacks, those moments of like crisis and like angst and what went wrong? And then that kind of prepares you for your next thing and like immunizes you against certain failures in the future.
[09:04] I actually think that StrengthsFinder and the philosophy that underlies it is probably the most positive thing in the world today to help human beings live their full potential, see each other through the lens of what’s right.
[09:34] So here’s what Freud said in one of his books, “I have found little that is good about human beings in the whole. In my experience, most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something you cannot say out loud or perhaps even think.”
[12:17] Living in your area of strengths, where your gifts lie is the best way to feel flourishing and fulfilled yourself.
[13:40] But someone asked me in an interview once, are you the father of strength psychology? I’m like, no. Like, I’m a total late comer to this.
[14:21] The uplift humanity is really caused by watching the mission of thousands and thousands of people who are devoting their life to helping individuals grow and develop.
[14:36] When people are valued, they do so much better, which is so great.
[15:23] Coaching is starting to take off. And when a coach has an instrument like StrengthsFinder or which is now called Clifton Strengths in honor of Don Clifton, the inventor. When a coach uses that instrument and they’re looking at you through the lens of, “hey, Tricia, what are your greatest talents?” Tell me stories of when you’ve used those. Describe your best day. Which of those strengths were you using during that best day?
[16:35] Coaching can dramatically increase individual performance and team performance and help people to become the best version of themselves.
[17:49 ] Peter Drucker once said that if you ask an American what their strengths are, most of them look at you with a blank stare or they answer in terms of subject knowledge or expertise, which he says is the wrong answer.
[19:45] You know how Popeye had a super strength, but he had to have spinach in order to unlock that strength? There’s actually 34 different spinaches that if you have connectedness, or if you have communication, you have to have the need met in order to use that strength, and so that means that people around you and the job expectation that you have needs to be aware of that need.
[20:24] Winning others over. Wooers need to “woo.” You need to meet new people on a regular basis because you get energy from meeting a stranger and turning them into a
friend.
[21:37] Harmony, you can actually bring harmony to tough situations or a crisis or a misunderstanding. You kind of become the bridge for people because you want all voices heard. You want all people appreciated.
[22:26] Includers need to include everybody. Includers are not in favor of cliques. They’re not in favor of anyone being excluded.
[24:26] I work with Tricia and she is so positive and uplifting and it’s contagious.
[25:44] Why doesn’t every school-age child start being told what their talents and strengths are? What about every college student? You know, there’s one public university that released a study that said that the dropout rate for freshmen going into their sophomore year was cut in half when the freshmen took StrengthsFinder and had coaching.
[28:26] Gallup studies well-being on a global scale. Every year they do a worldwide statistical sampling on most countries of the world to find out how many people are thriving in all five areas of well-being.
[30:24] Social relationships as some of your guests have pointed out, are incredibly important to life and to longevity. I was listening to one of your podcasts and I realized that the biblical phrase that says, “honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land,” is literally scientifically true. If you have a close relationship with your parents, you’ll live longer than if you have a dysfunctional relationship with your parents. So that’s this ancient biblical wisdom which science is now proving that if you have positive relationships, you will live longer and healthier.
[32:11] You know what happens when thousands of people get laid off? Some people die early of a stroke or a heart attack who would not actually have died if they hadn't been laid off. So I love the mission that you all have to help people increase their health and wellness.
[34:43] And every interaction you have with another human being either fills their bucket or it empties it. So your positivity, Tricia, is probably filling a lot of people's buckets with your kindness and your positivity and your good words, but a lot of people have a lot of negativity and they empty other people's buckets through all kinds of poor interactions.
Thank you for joining us on HealthGig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.
"I love learning more than I can possibly describe it." - Paul B. Allen
"Those of us who have family trees find incredible value and fulfillment in understanding our connection to the past." - Paul B. Allen
"StrengthsFinder and the philosophy that underlies it is probably the most positive thing in the world today to help human beings live their full potential, see each other through the lens of what's right."- Paul B. Allen
"Coaching can dramatically increase individual performance and team performance and help people to become the best version of themselves." - Paul B. Allen
Keywords
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