FULL TRANSCRIPT

00:00 – Show Opening

Are you a professional who wants to become a more effective leader? Then get ready for daily tips from the coach with the experience and inspiration to help you succeed in any leadership situation. You’re listening to the Meeting Leadership Podcast with Gordon Sheppard.

00:27 – Start Here – Podcast content starts here!

Gordon Sheppard: Welcome to another episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast. My name is Gordon Sheppard, and I just want to say thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being the type of professional who really wants to up their leadership skills and learn how to run outstanding meetings, and you’re coming to this podcast to do just that, to get the tips, to get the strategies that you need to bring forward so you can take action. Thank you so much for being here.

00:53 – Welcome back, David Papp!

Gordon Sheppard: In today’s episode, we get to do one of my favorite things, and that is to hear an inspirational story from one of the great guests that has been on the show. Today, we’re lucky to hear from David Papp. He’s going to share a story that’s going to make you want to jump literally out of your chair wherever you are and get up and get going. There’s some wisdom that I was able to pick up from him, and I know that you’re going to get a whole lot out of it as well. Here’s an inspirational story from David Papp.

Gordon Sheppard: David Papp, welcome back to the show. We are so lucky to have you here. Thanks for being here.

David Papp: Thanks Gord, always a pleasure.

01:29 – More from David Papp – MLP 079 – MLP 086

Gordon Sheppard: David knocked it out of the park. For any leader that needs information and inspiration about strategy and IT, David is an expert. You’ve got to go back and catch episode 79, episode 86 on the show, and then today, David was gracious enough to stick around to help us now from not so much an IT perspective, but from a leadership perspective. We’re going to be getting into that in just a moment. Now, David, I can tell you he’s a technology expert. He’s a self-described serial entrepreneur, maybe a bit of that syndrome where so many things are going on, but he has the ability to actually make it all work.

I’ve seen him as a professional speaker. I’ve recommended him to my clients to actually help them with their IT, websites, social media needs. He can do so many different things. David, there’s a lot of folks maybe that haven’t met you yet. Just in case they haven’t listened to those other episodes, how would you introduce yourself?

02:23 – David’s self-introduction

David Papp: Like you indicated, Gord, I’d describe myself as a man of many hats. I’m a technology pioneer. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I truly consider it myself to have a huge benefit of jumping into technology before the birth of the internet. It was back in the days of bulletin board systems, BDS, and honestly when we had command line, we were working on MS-DOS, and it wasn’t these windows gooey environments because you truly got to understand the technology. My background is a computer engineer.

I have a number of industry certifications, and truly, I love to play in the areas of cybersecurity and privacy, social media and marketing, technology management, block chain. I like to play with a little of everything.

Gordon Sheppard: Well, and having that big brain on the show has been highly, highly valuable, and with the great leaders that we have on the show like yourself, I always like to have an episode like this to just ask you a very simple question. That is this, “What inspires you?”

03:19 – The inspiring story of Gary Vaynerchuck

David Papp: Well, Gord, over the years, that has shifted depending on different influential people within my life or things that I follow online or shows I watch on YouTube, but lately, I got to say one thing that’s helped me and my staff is Gary V. It’s the Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk is an amazing speaker. He can be very raw sometimes when you’re listening to him, but he has some very insightful things to say. My favorite by far is just do it. One thing that we tend to do, a lot of us, is we’re having a meeting. You’re creating a new project.

You’ve got a new website you want to launch, a new service, a new product, and you overthink it. It’s never done. It’s always stuck at 80% done, 95 even 99% done, but to cross the finish line, you’re never quite happy. You tweak it. You make changes. You’re overthinking it, and it never actually launches. We’ll sit down and we’re having these meetings and brainstorming discussions with my staff and I. You can tell that we’ve gone off on another tangent or we’re getting a little too crazy on our idea.

 We’ll turn around and we’ll look at each other and we’ll say, “Gary V. Let’s Gary V. This thing.” What that means to us internally is to Gary V. something means just cut it right there. Let’s launch it. Let’s try it. Let’s see. Let’s throw that wet toilet paper against the wall and see if it sticks. Then you don’t waste too much more energy because let’s face it, we spend 20% of our time getting 80% of the way in an idea, but it takes us 80% of the time to finish that last 20%. In fact, I think it’s even more, way, way more.

Gordon Sheppard: Oh, I could not agree more. I can tell you, you’re so tweaking my 52-year-old self right now. I’ve got a couple of these university degrees under my belt, and I used to think that was a great thing until I got into this solo entrepreneur scenario where perfectionism, I didn’t realize. I thought I was just being perfect like picking the perfect font for a website or having the perfect document to take over to a client meeting. It’s absolutely useless when it comes to focusing on the things that you need to do.

The big gift that I got in relation to this was get away from A+. A+ is fine for school. In life, get a lot of B- done, and you will get way more done.

David Papp: Absolutely, Gord. A side joke that we have to this is that nobody’s looking at it anyways. We’re the only ones who are looking at our website and honestly our traffic levels. It’s not like we have a viral website or something with a million views per day or month or whatever. It might be like 10 views or 20 views. If nobody’s even looking at it, why are we being so critical of ourselves?

04:56 – The pitfall of perfection paralysis

Gordon Sheppard: Well and this perfection paralysis, Gary V. Is someone who helps you to overcome that.

David Papp: He is. I find him very inspirational with a lot of his messages. I really like how he’s tackled things. I mean, he was known as the wine guy. He’d find the perfect food to pair a wine with. It got down, he had a show. It was even so much where he’d like say, “With this hotdog, I would consider this wine to be the perfect drink to companies that, because it brings out the flavors of…” It was awesome. The guy is truly very creative. He’s built his entire empire Vaynerchuk Media from nothing.

05:39 – Stop overthinking it

David Papp: He has got a show. He’s got guys who can follow him along. I mean, he’s built himself his empire up to that point. I just find his message very inspirational of, “You know, stop over thinking this stuff, you guys. Let’s just get this done. Let’s just do it, see what happens and move along and we’ll be able to do so many other things within the organizations and enact so many other ideas that we have if we don’t get caught up on these ones that we want to perfect.”

Gordon Sheppard: Well, and this is really consistent with what you brought forward for leaders in the other episodes where you’re just recommending getting started, getting a few questions answered about their IT needs, for example, I think this type of message from your inspirational story is really going to resonate with the audience. David, if people need to get in touch with you, how can they do that?

07:20 – Get in touch with David Papp – http://davidpapp.com

David Papp: The best way is my website. It’s my name, davidpapp.com. I’ve got a whole bunch of different information on there and contact and whatnot, but honestly, I’m all over social media. You just punch in my name to Google and it comes up. It even brings up all the old stuff from the past. I always laugh about that. One of the best things everybody should do is to put in their own name into Google and see what comes up.

Gordon Sheppard: That can be a good thing, or it can be a bad thing. I’m glad you’re proud of it. That means you’ve lived a pretty good life. If you’re bold enough to put that out there, that’s a really good thing. David Papp, thank you so much for being on the show again.

David Papp: Anytime Gord, always a pleasure.

Gordon Sheppard:  Doesn’t that inspirational story make you want to just get up and get doing things? Get away from A+. Get away from perfectionism. It’s B- time so you can get more done and get things out the door. What a great leadership gift to yourself. Just as a reminder, if you’d like to get in touch with David directly, visit davidpapp.com. That’s David P-A-P-P.com. If you really enjoyed listening to him as much as I enjoyed interviewing him, then check out episode 79 on the Meeting Leadership Podcast.

08:20 – More from David Papp – MLP 079 – MLP 086

Gordon Sheppard:    It’s called Why All Leaders Need an IT Audit. That interview with David is available at meetingleadershipinc.com/79, and then if you want the 30,000-foot in the air leadership view, check out episode 86 on the podcast. It’s called Why All Leaders Need an IT Strategy. Again, David gives you so many great tips that you can put to use right away. It’s really worth listening to, and it’s available at meetingleadershipinc.com/86. I also want to let you know that this episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast is brought to you by the Meeting Leadership Academy.

08:59 –  Meeting Leadership Academy – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/academy

Gordon Sheppard:    Now there, I am so proud of all the great live training and online training options that you can get to build your leadership skills and learn how to run outstanding meetings. If you’d like to learn more, just visit meetingleadershipinc.com/academy. If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast just yet, please go ahead and do that. If you could leave a rating and a review, that would be very, very helpful so that we can get more great ideas to pass along to people just like you to help you build your leadership skills.

As always, thank you so much for listening. We’ll see you tomorrow on the Meeting Leadership Podcast.

09:43 – Podcast Outro

Thanks for listening to the Meeting Leadership Podcast. Be sure to subscribe for more strategies to help you become an outstanding leader. Don’t forget to rate and review so we can bring you fresh content every day. We’ll see you tomorrow right here on the Meeting Leadership Podcast.