The Power of Knowing Who You Are

Jon Clifton:
[0:06] I am with the founder of Ancestry.com and the founder of Soar.com, Paul Allen. Paul, thanks for joining us today.

Paul Allen:
[0:14] Great to be here.

Jon Clifton:
[0:15] Paul, your top five strengths, Learner, Input, Ideation, Intellection, Strategic. Throughout your entire career, which strength would you say helped you become so successful?

Paul Allen:
[0:26] So I don't think it's any one of those. I think my sixth strength is Analytical. So my top six strengths are all in the strategic thinking arena. And, you know, I always wanted to be an academic. I just, every class I took in college, I wanted to major in that subject. I have a voracious appetite for reading and learning. I've purchased and bought and read thousands of books. So learning, I would say, which is my number one strength, kind of defines me directionally. But without those other strengths, and especially without my seventh, eighth, and ninth Competition, Activator, and Achiever, I think that I would have been really happy in academia. But academia could provide limitless opportunities for learning and for teaching, but not necessarily for building or doing. So Competition, Activator, Achiever is like, okay, my top six might be thinking themes, but if I can't win and do something now and build and create outcomes, I'm not satisfied. So for me, it's this amazing, rich combination of thinking themes as well as other themes that kind of define how I work and what I'm aiming for. I didn't discover CliftonStrengths until 2012.

Jon Clifton:
[1:44] Okay.

Paul Allen:
[1:45] I was completely blown away. I don't think I understood myself or I don't think anyone else understood me until I read that report. And I felt like it knew exactly who I am, how I think, how I act, how I feel. And it kind of described everything I'd done in my life and why I had done it. And I regretted that I hadn't learned that 20 or 30 years earlier. I had so many mistakes as an entrepreneur not understanding the people that worked for me and projecting my Learner or my Ideation on everyone else. Just assuming that, oh, this is how I think. I'm sure everybody else feels the same way. And so, so many misfires, so many not understanding how to motivate individuals. I don't have Individualization.

But I got a coaching call from one of the Gallup coaches, an internal coach, and she talked especially about my Intellection and needing cave time and alone time. And I was just like, okay, when human babies are born, there is no operating manual for parents or teachers or counselors or friends to understand what makes this person tick. And I felt like if everyone in the world could know their CliftonStrengths and know how they tick and then know the strengths of everyone else around them, it would change the world. Because everyone's different, but we don't understand how different we are. And when you can understand what makes a person tick and what lights them up, team assignments, motivation, communication, everything changes.

When I discovered Don's work, I realized that Don had spent his lifetime analyzing the natural talents, the innate abilities of hundreds of thousands of successful people, and he created a taxonomy of hundreds of strengths. He boiled it down to the 34, did an online assessment so that every single person on earth could discover their innate natural talent, and with coaching and with the right experiences and knowledge and practice, you can take that raw material that you're born with and turn it into a higher value finished good. And that's what Don Clifton aimed for is that every human being should be able to experience excellence. What does it feel like to perform at near-perfect levels over and over again? You get rewarded for it. You get recognized for it, it's incredibly fulfilling. But if you never discover what your raw materials are, how can you end up with that higher value finished version of yourself?

Jon Clifton:
[4:10] Now, if I'm an aspiring entrepreneur and I have Learner in my top five, what advice would you give to me?

Paul Allen:
[4:17] Don't think that your other team members will have the same desire to read and study and go to conferences. Don't offer them a quarterly bonus of attending any learning conference that they want to if they hit their numbers. So I used to project my Learner on everyone. On the other hand, use your Learner to deeply study every person on your team. And start to realize that individual contribution is important, but that the combined contribution of everybody on your team, if you can learn what lights each person up and put them in the right role, give them the right manager, and put them on the right projects, the aggregate value created by a group of human beings is enormous. And so for me, I think I shifted in 2012, and then when I joined Gallup and worked here for five years, I started realizing that the most important thing for me to use my Learner on is not new things. That's always going to be a part of it. I follow the things that interest me. So I continue to subscribe and read and everything else. But I have coaching experiences with all of my team members. I have one-on-one interviews, and I study their strengths. And so my Learner is now aimed more at what can we do than just what can I do.

Jon Clifton:
[5:35] How many books do you read a year?

Paul Allen:
[5:37] Well, I probably order on average about one a day. And I probably don't fully read more than 30 or 40 a year. I read lots of first chapters, second chapters. So I think I am a desultory reader. I read bits and pieces. I'll open up to a chapter that I like and read that. I sometimes read the last chapter. So I start probably 200 books a year, and I probably finish 20 or 30.

Jon Clifton:
[6:10] If somebody has reached the pinnacle of Learner, if somebody has absolutely mastered that theme, what does it look like?

Paul Allen:
[6:17] Well, the funny thing is that Learners hate the idea that you can know it all. There's just no one that can ... so you could master the theme, which is maybe a perfect day and a curation of input and you're just learning and learning. I would say that if you feel like you've mastered the theme, it's that you are satisfying the itch, which is a daily itch, to learn enough. The things you care about the most. So it's like a harmony, it's like a balance. If you are all Learner then all your other themes would be starved. You can't just be all about one theme and so I would just say it's a carefully curated diet of information that keeps you excited every day. I mean there's so much to learn.

Jon Clifton:
[7:06] People that lead with Input often store all the information that they ever get. They'll either memorize it, as you've mentioned, or sometimes they put it in a notepad, maybe just like Leonardo da Vinci did with the Codex Lester. How do you store information?

Paul Allen:
[7:21] So I have hundreds of paper folders and notepads and different color-coded things, and then I collect thousands of books, and I have hundreds of boxes of material. I can't throw anything away. My dad's the same way. He's 92 now. And we've helped him move a few times. And he just has decades worth of information and knowledge. And, you know, today it's easier to digitize things early on. But for me, there's something about physical, tangible relics and notes that came from particular meetings. And so there's this realization when you have a real-world notebook from four years ago and you have notes from a meeting or you get a note from a person, like a handwritten note, the drops in the bucket that Don Clifton invented. I still have a dozen handwritten notes from Jim Clifton when he was the CEO and chairman thanking me for speeches. And those are priceless physical treasures. And a digital replica of that is not the same to me.

So I still do a lot of handwriting of notes and I collect. I moved two years ago and my former nicely organized office and library has been replaced with a poorly organized office and a smaller library. Organizing and classifying and being able to retrieve. If you have Input and you cannot retrieve a resource that you know you once had in your possession or had a file for, it drives you crazy. Input needs to be, an Input person is a utilitarian resource collector. And if you cannot squeeze that sponge and dispense out the thing that would help someone right now, it drives you crazy.

Jon Clifton:
[9:06] So when you're thinking about your classification process, indexing all the information that you've collected throughout your life, how do you do it?

Paul Allen:
[9:13] I had a cheat code from 1990 to 2012. My brother, Kurt, who became the CEO of Ancestry, had started a software company called Folio, and they built the world's best desktop search engine pre-internet. So all the main legal and like LexisNexis was using it, Mead Data Central, all the major accounting publications, the IRS regulations were all on CD-ROM indexed by Folio. Well, Folio in 1995 had a version that was a personal knowledge manager. And I started using it earlier. I had an earlier version. But for the first 22 years of my entrepreneurial career, I had a single infobase that I would type every single note into, every meeting. If I got an email that I wanted to preserve, I would copy and paste it. I would copy and paste articles from the internet. And I had information on over 3,000 companies. I had tens of thousands of notes that I had typed in or copied and pasted in. And the cool thing was it was a single file, 212 megabytes, and I could scroll from the top to the bottom lightning fast with a page down. I could do a full text search for any person's name or company name. I could create little clusters of things. I could hypertext link. It was the best personal knowledge management tool ever created, but it hasn't continued into the modern Windows world. So, I think Windows 7 or Windows XP was the last operating system that could run the Folio Infobase. I had my personal journals in there for like 30 years, and now I'm kind of without this powerful tool, and I haven't, I use Google Docs mostly, I have thousands of Google Docs. It's just super unwieldy. What I had for 22 years was a knowledge worker's dream, and the software disappeared.

Jon Clifton:
[11:04] How do you see strengths impacting the future of the world?

Paul Allen:
[11:10] I think strengths can impact the future of the world in every context of life. I feel like it has an immediate impact in work, in leaders and managers, understanding people, in assigning the right roles, having teams that understand each other's strengths. Obviously, that creates high-performing teams. So there's a great workplace application of strengths. And then, of course, in education, in higher education, you see hundreds of thousands of freshmen and other college students in this country every year taking it. And that's such a great time when they're trying to figure out what major should I have and what career should I go into. And I think with more data, there's the potential for every young person to take StrengthsFinder, either CliftonStrengths in high school or in their early years of college, and to use it more intentionally as a career choosing tool, as well as a major choosing, as well as a career choosing tool.

And then mentoring, as I said earlier, when you have the wrong mentor or are getting the wrong advice that isn't cognizant of your top themes, it backfires a lot of times because people feel discouraged. Like, I can't be like John. I can't be like Susan. I'm a failure because I'm not them. That's not the case. So you need that advice to come through that lens. But even outside of workplace and education, marriage and dating could be supercharged with strengths awareness. I mean, there's so many fun possibilities in that regard. And then in the faith community, there's a great book called Living Your Strengths that Don and Al Winseman and Curt Liesveld wrote 20 years ago, a fantastic way to bring CliftonStrengths into the 71 or 80 percent of people in the world that are people of faith, and to use that to find out what volunteer projects should you be working on, or what ministries, or what service could you be giving in your faith community.

And then I actually have a big dream. I'm working on a startup inside of SOAR called Citizen Portal, where every single public official in the United States, It's the 585,000 people who serve in elected office at the school board level, the city council level, the county level, state legislature, or the federal offices. 585,000 fellow Americans who get elected. And I'd like to know what all of their strengths are. I'd like elections to be about what does each candidate bring to the election instead of how can we demonize and hate on each other and call each other stupid and evil. If this person gets elected, the country's going to hell. And instead of that, Kansas State University's student body president election focuses on the debate is on the strengths of each candidate. I've got Futuristic. Here's what I'm going to offer the university. I've got Connectedness. I've got Harmony. Here's what I'm going to offer the university. And let the student body vote based on the themes that the person brings to the office. If we could somehow affect public discourse by talking more about each other's strengths and focusing on the potential instead of just hating on each other.

And Arthur Brooks, of course, Love Your Enemies, his book is fantastic about trying to eliminate contempt from public discourse and replace it with civility, respect, and even love. And I think CliftonStrengths is not only the most powerful psychological assessment in history to unlock human talent, but it's also a positive assessment. The reason that so many other assessments are accurate and interesting, but don't inspire me, is that they don't give me words that are positive about me. I mean, do you want to know how neurotic you are on the big five test? Do you want to know if you're extroverted or introverted? If you're introverted, do you want to say, what's my development path to become the world's greatest introvert? Where's the development path for these other accurate, but not necessarily helpful assessments?

So the strengths assessment, the CliftonStrengths ought to infuse all areas of life, family, faith, civic, workplace, and education. And then individuals who have their themes ought to have access to their themes in all of those contexts. And the more awareness that you have inside of families and friends and communities, as well as education and workplace settings, the more each of us can grow into the creation that we were originally designed to become if we take our raw natural talent, give it the experiences, the knowledge, the skills, the practice that is needed, and all of a sudden everyone gets to experience excellence in all contexts of life. I mean, it's not the silver bullet that solves all the world's problems, but it's a huge ingredient in solving the problems of the world. Number one, it's positive. The world needs a huge dose of positivity. Number two, it's incredibly accurate about each person's individual talents and potential. And it creates way more productive, high-performing teams, workplaces, study groups. It does all those things. It's so good.

Jon Clifton:
[16:41] And how do you build teams knowing their strengths? Knowing people's strengths.

Paul Allen:
[16:45] I'm doing it better now than I ever did before. Before I lucked into some talent and had a lot of turnover in my early, I'd say 12 years. In my new post-strengths awareness realm, we actually use StrengthsFinder with candidates. We don't use it as a decision-maker in hiring, but we use it to have a conversation about them and how they've used their strengths in the past. So it's not a hiring assessment, but it's a great tool for conversation. And then once we have a team grid with all their strengths on it and every interaction that I have with people, I'm trying to be cognizant of their strengths. So it's partly – I'm not really great at recruiting yet. I don't really know how to crack the code on hiring world-class talent. I've hired many people with world-class talent, but it was more accidental. And I know Gallup has expertise going back decades in hiring assessments. I've never done that or invested in that. So I would say I'm not great at that. But I think once we have people on board, we're getting really good at helping them grow with their strengths and making sure there's awareness of each other's strengths in the team.

Jon Clifton:
[17:57] Now, all leaders who have been successful have had serious obstacles that they've had to overcome. What's an obstacle or a few obstacles that you've had to overcome in your career? And what strength did you use in order to overcome those obstacles?

Paul Allen:
[18:12] That is amazing. I've never been asked that question. The obstacles, I would say, I talked to a friend the other day who, he's going to introduce me to one of the founders of one of the top internet sites in the 1990s, an internet publishing site. I won't say the name. But at one point, he had $100 million net worth, and then he had to declare bankruptcy a few years later because the internet boomed, then the internet bubble burst, and a lot of companies went out of business. So I've looked up to this guy for a long time, and he went through a bankruptcy, then a divorce. He overcame depression, and now he's back at it. Well, I didn't go through a bankruptcy, but my ownership in Ancestry.com went from 48.5% when it was profitable in 1998 when I was the CEO, 48.5% of a profitable .com growing like crazy. After the bubble burst, our Series E emergency funding round happened. There was a major negotiation between the current preferred investors and the common investors and a conversion of all preferred. We had a serious down round. My percentage ownership went from 48.5% to 2%. I remember Steve Jobs once said he lost $250 million in one day, and that was a character-building experience for him. Elon Musk apparently has lost more money in the last few months than any other human in history, but he had so much to start with, so he's going to be fine. That was a big gut punch for me, to lose control of my company. I told you I'd step down as CEO, and then to see my ownership go down to 1/25th of what it was when it was a profitable. com.

The second gut punch for me was in 2007 when I met Mark Zuckerberg. I bought into the Facebook platform idea, launched an app for families and a genealogy app inside of Facebook with a great team, and got 120 million users. Disney wanted to invest in us. Disney started selling all of our ad inventory because we were the most family-friendly app on Facebook with tens of millions of active users. And our revenue was skyrocketing. Then Facebook pulled the plug on all third-party apps in late 2009, 2010, early 2010, and I lost $750,000 in monthly revenue and had to lay off 40 people. And it took me two years to get that company in a state where we could sell. We sold half of it to Ancestry and half of it to MyHeritage in Israel with the help of a friend. Those two gut punches where I could have been extremely wealthy with either of those two having an exit. And in the first instance, I was so mad at the venture capital community for what they had done because they had given us all these assurances, you know, we'll write you a check for 13 million, then 30 million, then 35 million. We'll take care of you. You know, here's how it's going to work. We're going to have a great exit together. And then it became adversarial when everything hit the fan in 2000. So for the first time in my life, I was angry at other people and very upset.

Jon Clifton:
[21:18] And so what strength was it that helped you?

Paul Allen:
[21:24] It was actually my Belief, which is my 12th strength. So I have Maximizer, Belief, Significance are 11, 12, and 13. But I had a pretty powerful, I would say, spiritual experience regarding anger and wealth and how should I feel about losing my company. I was reading in the New Testament one morning, and it was right before a big church event, and I read the teachings of Paul in 1st Corinthians. My mom named me Paul, so I've always liked Paul, and Paul the Apostle was quite the character, evangelizing all over the world. And I read this verse that just struck me to the core. It said, I planted, this is Paul speaking, I planted and Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. Therefore, he that planted is not anything, neither he that watered, but God that gave the increase. And I realized that when I had started Ancestry.com, I had a dream about building a site called MyFamily.com, and we did that, and it raised the $75 million. The idea for that dream, that's where all the money came from. And then I thought about who created me, gave me breath, and is this really mine? Was this company really mine? And so as soon as I read that and I realized that humans are really nothing compared to deity and all creation and the great universe and in the scheme of things, we're nothing. On the other hand, we're everything, the most important creations in the world.

But that Belief and maybe my Connectedness, 17, that little faint strand of Connectedness said, don't be angry about losing something that really wasn't yours in the first place. Or that, you know, when I die, I won't get to take any wealth with me anyway. So I immediately let go of all the anger. It was an incredible transformation. I tried to share this with other friends who were also angry, and it didn't help any of them. It turned out to be a very personal message that allowed me to have resilience and to take the long view.

Jon Clifton:
[23:43] Talk more about how you use your Competition. It's your number seven. I hate to lose. You and I have talked about it before. but what do you see is your when you say you hate to lose what's the game you're in? Who's your competitor?

Paul Allen:
[23:58] Yeah so my wife and I have had lots of chats about this. First of all when I took my kids bowling at a young age they would usually come home crying because dad beat them all really badly. My wife always said just let them win. I couldn't. I couldn't let any of my kids win. My daughter once beat me in chess. And she was like 12. And I, because I hadn't tried very hard, and I was so mad. And so I said, let's play again. And so then I was just slaughtering her in the, in the chess game. And then she turned the board around and said, okay, now beat me. I think I was up eight pieces and she turned the board and says, okay, now beat me.

Um, so Competition, I love sports and I have my favorite teams and you know, you get despondent when they lose and you feel like a champion when they win. So I definitely have always had that sense. But Competition for me is really, it's not about how much money I have or it's really about impact. I watched a video years ago from a kind of a rap philosopher dude who goes up in the mountains and does like a poetic rap philosophical thing. And he talked about in the new world and he has all this great visual image of the globe and internet pipes and lights and signals and how interconnected the world is today. And he says, the new definition of a billionaire is not to have a billion dollars, it's to affect a billion people. So I would say that in my Competition life, I think of Ancestry.com helping 100 million or more people discover their ancestors. I knew that Myfamily.com, had it continued to be a free site, would have reached at least a billion people by now. It was in the tens of millions in the early 2000s growing by 30,000 a day with no advertising and that got shut down. So that's super painful to have a brainchild that could have reached a billion people and then the Facebook thing had a hundred million hundred and 20 million users and then it got shut down, so my Competition is telling me and pushing me to stay in the game.

Jon Clifton:
[26:06] How about with Strategic? How do you develop Strategic every day?

Paul Allen:
[26:13] Strategic is a little dangerous for me because I have Ideation. And so I think some people that have Strategic, I remember when Meg Whitman left Disney and Hasbro to become the CEO of eBay. And she realized that the pace of eBay was so fast that the 18-month planning retreats that Disney and Hasbro used to do were fine for those kind of real-world physical product distribution companies. But they don't work on the internet. She said eBay had to revisit its strategy every day. And when the world changes so quickly, like when GPT launches, ChatGPT, or when OpenAI launches that at the end of November, it disrupts everything. And so I would say, you know, you can't really revise your entire strategy daily, but I think you have to be open-minded. People with Strategic hate when you can't make mid-course corrections. Your strategic plan will never be perfect. And if you have a strong strategy theme, you know that mid-course corrections, if a new piece of information comes in or a new company starts up or something launches or a competitor does this, that changes the dynamic and your strategy has to adjust. So I'm never comfortable with a long-term strategic plan. I'm comfortable with drafting a draft, as long as we call it that. And then being willing to revisit our strategy, at least on a weekly basis.

Jon Clifton:
[27:41] Considering your top six, your thinking themes, do you consider yourself an entrepreneur or an inventor?

Paul Allen:
[27:49] I think I'm both. I have a few patent filings. I've gotten one patent issued. I think I should have gotten two others issued. We just didn't argue with the patent office enough. I've got one that we're arguing right now. Really cool kind of breaking ground in information retrieval theory. So I think I do some inventing, but I think most of my work has been bringing those inventions to the public. So that Competition drive and that desire to get millions of people using this product and tens of millions and, you know, 100 plus million, that drive to me makes me an entrepreneur.

Jon Clifton:
[28:30] Now, if there was an aspiring entrepreneur that had Ideation in their top five, what advice would you give them?

Paul Allen:
[28:37] Make sure you have executing themes or you surround yourself with people that are very good at execution. I love to have Achievers with Responsibility, either my executive assistant or key people on my staff. When you've got Ideation, it's a bit out of control most of the time. And so you need partners that can take responsibility for some of those ideas and then get them through to execution. So definitely realize that Ideation is a gift. I remember one of the senior scientists at Gallup told me that the 34 themes, if you look at which themes predict good financial outcomes in the future on, I think, a six-month or a one-year basis, Ideation was the worst to have. I actually know a lot of entrepreneurs who can't stop having new ideas, and they never execute on any of them. So I would just say either look at yourself carefully to see if you can actually take an idea all the way through or make sure you have a team that can do that execution for you because ideas without being built don't really matter. They're fun, but that won't feed your family.

Jon Clifton:
[29:50] Now, one of the things that we talk about often is this concept of being well-rounded. And you have a really fascinating strengths profile because, as you mentioned, your top six are all strategic thinking. If someone else were to get that in their top six, just all one theme, what would you tell them?

Paul Allen:
[30:10] Well, when I looked at my full 34 report, it was a little bit discouraging to feel that my first relationship strength was my 17th. It's Connectedness. And so here I am, you know, very, my 10th is Futuristic. So seven of my top 10 are thinking themes. And then I've got two influencing themes and an executing theme. No relationship themes until my 17th. And that was a little bit disheartening, and I thought oh great can I even form relationships? Like I mean I have friends and I've got a wife and kids and but it was really discouraging to think that I don't have any strength in relationship building. So I made a comment at a Gallup event, it was a two-day coaching and training session, and Jacque Merritt who's one of the greatest coaches of all time, she said to me, I said, you know, what do I do? I can't form relationships. And she says, Paul, I've watched you the last two days. You form relationships around your Ideation. She's like, use the strengths you've got to get the relationships you want. She said, I've watched you. If there's ever an idea, you're collaborating with people.

So relationship building as a domain, the four quadrants came later. They weren't part of the kind of original design. It was a very helpful clustering, but you don't box yourself in and say, I can't execute because I don't have any executing themes, or I can't influence because I don't have any influencing themes. Use the strengths you've got, whatever domain they're in, to get the outcome that you want. And that advice from Jacque made all the difference for me. I no longer had any negative response to the CliftonStrengths. I saw it as all positive, including my weaknesses or my lesser strengths. And just an eye-opening, shine a light on who you are, what makes you tick, and then do the same for everyone else around you. Look at everybody through the lens of strengths. I used to walk along the streets of Washington, D.C., and if you pass someone that's homeless, I started thinking, I wonder what their strengths are. And I wonder if they ever found out what any of their talents were. Because they probably didn't. Maybe the reason they're in the state that they're in is that that natural talent and ability that they were born with and developed early in life was never identified, labeled, and developed.

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