Podcast Blog #4: Quentin Allums and Lewis Howes — First Memory (Stupid Deep Ep.1)
How personal connection (and the power of LinkedIn) helped a retired professional football player get past his anger and find success as an entrepreneur
Has there ever been a day in your life where you knew everything changed? Or something you tried for the first time that you knew would put your life on a different course?
Lewis Howes shares how being vulnerable about in his past changed everything for him in episode #1 of Stupid Deep, a podcast hosted by Quentin Michael Allums.
Read my podcast blog below for detailed takeaways from Lewis and Quentin’s episode.
Quentin Michael Allums: The moments that change your life (0:00)
For Quentin, that was October 5th, 2019, the day his little brother passed away. Suddenly the world looked different as he went through grief and thought that no one knew what he was going through.
Until one day, sitting in a bar, Quentin came across messages online from others talking about death, loss, and pain. Reading those messages of pain brought him closer to people and to the world. It was one of the most powerful moments in his life.
What were those moments for other people? What moments that seem small change their life?
Lewis Howes: What do you do when you lose the thing you’re best at? (1:20) For Lewis Howes — a former professional football player turned entrepreneur, New York Times bestselling author, and podcast host — that day was discovering the role of connection through Linkedin. But first, let’s back up. How did a professional football player end up on Linkedin looking for work? For Lewis, his life for years revolved around being the best, namely at sports. But then the injury happened. Suddenly he had to find something to do with the rest of his life now that the thing he knew best was gone.
He found a mentor in 2007 who introduced him to Linkedin. And it made him realize his superpower of human observation.
Quentin Michael Allums: Being an early adopter (2:55) Linkedin, really? When you think of social networks, many come to mind before you think of Linkedin, even in 2007 — Twitter, Facebook, and the like. But for Linkedin, there was value in being an early adopter. That’s where Quentin got his start. There was so little activity happening on Linkedin, that it was easier to get noticed if you put out quality content.
Ok, back to Lewis’ story.
Lewis Howes: The skill of observation: finding what makes people tick (4:01) Lewis went all in, spending six hours a day there, connecting and sending messages to folks he didn’t know. Nine out of ten messages he sent got a reply. Through trial and error, he understood what made these businesspeople on the platform tick. His thought process was — “If I was in this position, what would I want to read? What would make me reply?”
That skill of observation — finding what worked and what didn’t by watching — was a common thread in Lewis’s life. He didn’t have many friends growing up, so he sought to teach himself social skills by watching other kids’ mannerisms and body language. A skill he never thought useful, but something he still values today.
Quentin Michael Allums: The art of mirroring (5:15) While athletics wasn’t Quentin’s escape, he could relate to what Lewis was talking about from his experience using poetry as an outlet. Quentin describes himself as always the super quiet kid in the back of a room watching people, and he claims it taught him a lot about marketing. It’s all about understanding behavior and psychology. The most important concept Quentin learned was from Chris Voss about mirroring. When someone is telling him a story, he repeats back key parts of what was said to get them to keep speaking on the topic and dig deeper.
Back to Lewis.
Lewis Howes: Realizing you’re not alone in the thing that scares you the most (7:30) Sports became Lewis’s identity after a challenging childhood. One of his first memories was of being raped by a man he didn’t know at 5 years old. A few years later, his brother went to prison on drug charges, and he wasn’t welcomed by others in his neighborhood. At 13, he moved to boarding school and lived in a dorm from 8th grade through his senior year of high school. There, he focused his anger on the football field, and from there it became his identity.
But eventually, sports ended, and he didn’t have a new way to channel his anger that he still had from his painful childhood. He ended up in a fistfight after a pickup basketball game. It was so bad, he left physically shaking and asking himself “Who are you? What is wrong with you?”
This moment was an awakening — he had to deal with the root of his anger, not find another outlet to bury it in. So he found an emotional intelligence workshop. In that environment, he had the feeling that he had to share about his past, or he never would escape what he was feeling.
At the workshop, he told his story of being raped when he was five. Then he ran out. But then, something beautiful happened. Others followed him and opened up about their stories that they had kept quiet their entire lives. Lewis gave them the courage to open up. When Lewis shared this story publicly on his podcast, the hundreds of essays flooded in of men sharing stories they’d never shared before.
Quentin Michael Allums: Opening up to the world (12:35) Quentin speaks of this universal feeling — that we all have something inside of us that we’re afraid to share with the world, wondering what people will think of us, thinking that no one has gone through what we’ve gone through. What he spoke about, and heard from guests like Lewis, is that the thing that we fear the most is the thing holding us back the most, and it often ends up not being something we have to go through on our own.
Ep #001: Stupid Deep Podcast by Quentin Michael Allums
0:00 | QMA: The moments that change your life
1:20 | LH: What do you do when you lose the thing you’re best at?
2:55 | QMA: Being an early adopter
4:01 | LH: The skill of observation: finding what makes people tick
5:15 | QMA: The art of mirroring
7:30 | LH: Realizing you’re not alone in the thing that scares you the most
12:35 | QMA: Opening up to the world
13:53 | End
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