Hey, this is Nick Nappo, and when I’m not winning trivia championships, I’m listening to John Garrett on the Green Apple podcast.

John: Hello, this is John Garrett, and welcome to episode 135 of the Green Apple podcast where each Wednesday, I interview a professional who, just like me, is known for a passion or an interest outside of work, making them stand out like a green apple in a boring red apple world. I’m always so fascinated at how we usually try to stand out with our technical expertise. I’m here to shine a light each week on someone who understands that expertise isn’t always earned in degrees and certifications.

Sometimes, it’s experiences from your passions outside of work that make you better at your job, but only if you let them. Something else that’s really fascinating is that time is the only resource that you can’t make more of, making it the most precious. What we do with our time outside of work is a much better indicator of who we truly are and what drives us.

Also, really, really quickly – I’m doing some research. It’s a super short, one-minute, anonymous survey about corporate culture and how the Green Apple message might apply in your world. If you’ve got just 60 seconds, please go to greenapplepodcast.com, click that big green button there, answer a few quick questions. Again, it’ll take about a minute. It’s totally anonymous. I really, really appreciate the help.

Thanks so much to everyone for subscribing to the show so you don’t miss any of the cool guests I have each week like this week’s Nick Nappo. He’s a marketing specialist at Konica Minolta outside of New York City and I’ve come to find out a big fan of the podcast. It’s so cool to be able to say thanks, Nick, for listening, and for taking time to be with me today on the Green Apple Podcast.

Nick: Oh, you’re welcome, John. Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

John: Oh, man, I’m so excited. I gave everybody a little bit of a introduction, but maybe in your own words, it’s best to – where you’re working now and maybe a little bit of how you got there.

Nick: Yeah, sure. I am a marketing specialist at Konica Minolta business solutions, like you said. I work within the digital marketing department. When I say I’m a marketing specialist, what I really specialize in is marketing automation. What I do is I manage email campaigns using a platform called Marketo. Some of you use marketing automation. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.

I also leverage the analytics associated with the email campaigns that we do for maximum effectiveness, just looking to see how we can improve the campaigns that we do just so we can form the best relationship with our customers from a digital marketing standpoint.

John: Right. No, that’s awesome, man. That’s so great, especially nowadays where if people click on something, then that means they’re interested in it, so then there’s another email they get, and things like that.

Nick: We’ve got a whole system for measuring that kind of stuff. You can really pinpoint a customer’s activity using marketing automation, which is great, just like from an account-based marketing standpoint, because then you can really trace the active use of whatever prospect you’re tracking and just really get them every step of the journey. It’s great to have.

John: Right, and I love the way you framed it. It’s to develop a better relationship with your customer, to serve them better. That’s awesome. That’s great. One question I love to ask everyone is just, how’d you get into that? What made you want to go into marketing?

Nick: Okay, it’s interesting. I’ve had sort of an interesting path. I actually come into marketing from a theater performing arts background. I was a double major in theater and Spanish in college with a minor in arts administration, which is basically like the business part of show business.

After college, I served various administrative roles in theater companies and arts organizations around the New York metro. Then after about a year and a half, I was looking to make a change. I didn’t know where exactly to turn. Of all things, I consulted the Myers-Briggs personality test. “Let me just take this online test. Maybe it’ll provide some sort of guidance. What have I got to lose?”

I took the test, and the results of it ended up describing me better than I ever could. I was just amazed. I’m an ENFJ. It just described me so well. Intricacies and everything. I was like, wow, this is amazing.

With the personality type, it outlined various career paths that somebody with that personality type could take potentially. One of them was marketing. I thought, hmm, that’s really interesting. Because I knew I wanted to go into business, but I didn’t know exactly how and in what capacity. When I looked at marketing, it struck a chord, because it seemed to me like the perfect marriage of the business acumens as well as the creative acumens, which I had, and which I knew I wanted to utilize in my career.

With that in mind, I went back to school. I got my master’s from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York in Integrated Marketing and Communication. I was part of the first cohort to pass through that program. Then I began a marketing career, first on the agency side, interning with an ad agency, and then I did marketing for a financial services firm in the Hudson Valley region of New York. Then after that, I began my tenure at Konica Minolta. I’ve been at Konica Minolta for a little over a year. It was actually a year on March 20th.

John: Nice. That’s awesome, man. Yeah. I think we first talked shortly after you had started there.

Nick: Yeah.

John: Yeah. That’s great, man. It’s funny, because in the moment, it feels like you’re zigzagging all over the place, but then you look backwards, and it’s almost a straight line. Yeah, clearly, this was what I was meant to do.

Nick: This is my path. This is what was written. You’ve just got to go with it.

John: Right. That’s so fantastic, man. Especially coming from the theater performing arts background. Throw Spanish in there as well. It’s like, wow.

Nick: I’m still trying to find a way to utilize that other than whenever I go to a restaurant or something.

John: Right, or on vacation.

Nick: When I hit Cancun or something.

John: Right, exactly. Exactly. That’s awesome, man. That’s awesome. That’s got to keep you very busy. But what sort of hobby passions do you love to do when you do have that free time on nights and weekends.

Nick: As I’ve told you before, I love trivia. It’s something I’ve been doing for the past few years, and I think that’s going to be sort of the crux of our conversation, so we’ll get into that in a second. When I’m not playing trivia, one other thing I’ve been doing for the past couple years is performance poetry. Performing and writing my own poetry for the past couple years with a group up here in Rocklin County just about 30 miles north of Manhattan. It’s a great way for me to flex my creative juices. It’s a nice outlet for my love of performance and just getting up in front of people. It’s enabled me to travel the country and meet people. That’s actually why I was in Denver, because the National Poetry Slam was there last August. I was there for about a week. Fun fact, actually, the Denver Post actually did an article about the National Poetry Slam, and they included one of my haikus in it.

John: Nice. That’s great.

Nick: I guess they liked my haiku. They put it in that article.

John: This is the poetry slam, or is this…?

Nick: Yeah. It’s the National Poetry Slam. Poetry Slam, Incorporated is kind of like the governing body, if you will, for performance poetry. Every year, they do a national poetry slam. It basically rotates between four cities. The year before this, I was in Decatur, Georgia outside of Atlanta. Last year, it was in Denver. Then this year, it’s going to be in Chicago. Then next year, it’s coming to Oakland. It’s basically between those four cities with maybe like a random one thrown in. It’ll be in Denver in probably another four years or so. You should check it out.

John: Yeah, definitely, man. That’s awesome. You got into trivia a few years ago. How did that happen?

Nick: I’ve always kind of known a whole lot about nothing, so to speak. Many friends can attest to the fact that I’ve always been a repository or useless information. But I didn’t really consummate it until the summer after I graduated college when I started joining my brother and his friends at a local trivia night in northeast Pennsylvania, like right across the state border from where we lived, kind of near the intersection between New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

It was a neighborhood bar and grill. It was wing night, so they have 50 cent wings and all this stuff, and they had trivia. My brother had been before, but I had never been. I sat and it was just all of us and we were playing this game, and as we were playing, I was like, wow. This is fun. Really fun.

Not only am I having a good time, really enjoying the competitive vibe associated with it, but finally, there’s an outlet for all of this random stuff that I know. All of those countless hours of perusing Wikipedia articles and watching Brady Bunch are coming to fruition. They actually do have a Brady Bunch round.

John: That’s awesome. You were born for this. You were just like – this is it! Finally.

Nick: Yeah. Ultimately, we didn’t win that night, but when I got home, I told my brother “You’ve got to tell me the next time you’re having one of these or you’re going to one of these, because that was just too much fun.”

I played with him once more, and then when I moved out on my own and I started making my own friends, we would go to trivia nights just around the Hudson Valley just as a fun thing to do during the week. We played, and we won a lot of the times. After a while, we were like “Hey, we’re pretty good at this. Maybe we should kick it up a notch.”

We ended up forming our own little group through a meetup called the “POW Trivia All Stars”. POW is an acronym for “Putnam, Orange, and Westchester” which are the three counties where all of the original members – the original group of us – were from. That’s how we just played more and we got a little more organized. That’s how we got more people to join our group, and we expanded not just the group scope but also the scope of our social circle. We made a whole bunch of new friends. That’s how we found out about tournaments.

We’ve traveled around. We’ve done Atlantic City. We won the national championship in Atlantic City.

John: That’s awesome.

Nick: Thank you. We’ve also been to Seattle. We’ve been to Boston. We’ve actually played together in five different states, which is pretty cool. It’s just really been a wonderful thing that I’ve been involved with. It’s been fun. I’m amazed just at how much it’s really become a part of my life. But hey, I think there are worse things to get into, right?

John: Oh, for sure. For sure. Like starting a podcast. That’s so fantastic, especially with you guys traveling and getting friends together is how it started and getting new friends. That’s really awesome, man. That’s cool.

Nick: Yeah, we’re just like this big, happy extended family. We get along really well. Whenever we play, we always have fun. There’s very little drama. We just play really well together as a team. It I think explains the success we’ve had.

John: Yeah. Absolutely. Is there a cooler moment or – I guess probably winning the world Tavern Trivia National Championships is probably one of them.

Nick: That was pretty awesome.

John: Anything that stands out in particular about that?

Nick: It was just fun being in Atlantic City and just playing at Resorts Casino and just being on the boardwalk and just hanging out and just kind of meeting people from up and down the eastern seaboard and just being with everybody and just seeing everybody have fun and enjoy themselves and just kind of the trill of knowing that when you work well together as a team, you put your heads together, you come up with a lot of the right answers, the synergy really proves effective. It helped you to become victorious. That was a really good experience.

Then what happened was when we got home, we reached out to the paper thinking, well, maybe they’ll do a story, but maybe they won’t. We just reached out and the guy called me the next day and they ended up doing a story. We went to this local TGI Fridays, and we had a little photoshoot, which is where the photo you saw in the article – that’s where it came from. It was just fun. Three of us at a table, and we had to do these poses and stuff where we pass the shoot back and forth. It was an interesting experience. It was really cool.

John: That’s awesome, man. That’s so cool. That’s really, really neat. Really neat. It sounds a lot like it’s almost like being at work where you have a team and people that work well together. Does any of this translate over to when you go to the office?

Nick: Oh, my gosh. There’s so much in trivia that I’ve discovered really converts well to success in an office and in the business world.

John: Yeah. Anything in particular?

Nick: There are a bunch of things. You know, just speaking to the team motif that you were describing, when we play trivia, I feel like the most successful teams draw from a variety of ages and a variety ages of different backgrounds and knowledge. People in our group – we have millennials. We’ve got gen X. We’ve got boomers. There are people from all walks of life. Each of us really brings something unique to the table.

We have my one friend who – she’s really into sports. There’s another friend who knows all of the Star Wars movies from beginning to end. Then we have another guy who has a really extensive knowledge of music, particularly old music. What we’re doing is we’re really drawing from their various expertises and their various talents to really come up with a cohesive solution.

I think that draws really close parallels with the business world where, in a company, if you’re working on a team, everybody brings something unique to the table. Everybody has something that they’re really skilled at and that they’re really passionate about. If you really harness all of those skills and passions and talents, you can really make great things happen. You can achieve your goals and your objectives. You can really maximize your effectiveness as a team. That’s one lesson that’s come out of trivia.

John: No, that’s well said. Especially if you allow the people to share those passions and share what makes them unique and share that skill set that they have.

Sure, your friend that has all the Star Wars memorized or the other one that knows all the music or the other one that knows all the sports – but if it’s like, well, no, we need to know something else, so we don’t want to know any of that. It’s like, yeah, but that all matters. I think when you get into the workplace, I think people focus so much on their “expertise” that they got from college and their certifications that they forget about this other expertise that they have and they think that no one cares, but it matters. It makes that team more well-rounded, and it makes you an expert in something.

Nick: Yeah. Exactly. There are times when we play when we don’t know the answer and we don’t have any semblance of an idea. So when that happens, we put our heads together and we try and work as a team and we try and talk it out, and we try and communicate effectively and just listen and just come up with the best possible answer.

Will it be right? Probably not. But it’s definitely going to be wrong if we don’t write something and it we don’t make an effort. Those are some other skills, too, just communication and listening and just accepting people’s ideas and just working past the kind if adversity to really achieve a solution. There’s something about that, as well.

John: No, absolutely, man. It’s great that you’re able to see that, that there is that crossover from one to the other. I remember when I was back in PWC, I didn’t realize that my doing standup mattered. It was just something that I accidentally talked about because somebody said “What’d you do this weekend?” I was like, well, you asked, so I’m going to tell you.

Is the trivia something that you talk about at work or something that comes up?

Nick: Oh, yeah. At this point, everybody goes in on my trivia. On the side of my cubicle, I have a little whiteboard, and I put a question of the week on there. The way my cubicle is situated, the whiteboard hangs right on the side, so everybody sees it as they’re walking towards it. I can’t tell you how many people have stopped dead in their tracks to read the question, and they try and figure it out. Some people try and answer on the spot. Others walk past me, and they’re like, hmm. And some just figure it out.

Some people get it. But it’s fun, because people see it, and sometimes they just – it’s amazing. Sometimes, they just drive themselves crazy trying to figure out this question.

John: Right. That’s such a cool thing, though, because what you’re doing there is you’re opening the door for them. You’re saying, hey, I’m a real person. If you want to be a real person, too, let’s do this.

Nick: Yeah. It’s a way to instill a sense of fun. A way to just kind of break the ice and just loosen the vibe a little bit and just do something fun. You’ve got to smile. You’ve got to really enjoy what you do. Like you said, and like you always say with this podcast, you’ve got to be human about what you do. You’ve got to be a real person. We’re not all androids sitting at a desk churning out work. We’re real people with thoughts and feelings and interests and talents.

Any way you can really bring that out, no matter how small, I think, is very valuable.

John: Yeah. I agree, totally. Would you say that doing trivia has benefited your career?

Nick: Yeah. I mean, well, my career is still going. I haven’t really been in it for a whole – for a while. But in the positions that I’ve had, yeah, I’d say it definitely has. Particularly with relevance to Konica Minolta, I think it’s been really good, because I’ve drawn some parallels between me joining trivia and really what the company does.

If you can always tie your passion and your interest to the mission of a company, that’s always a great thing. To succeed in trivia, it really takes an innate curiosity about the world around you, and I’ve always had it even since I was a kid. I still have it now. I’ll be in line at Dunkin Donuts waiting to get coffee or whatever, and I’ll just think to myself “When did the Rolling Stones’ Give Me Shelter come out? How many times was Spielberg nominated for an Oscar? For God’s sake, what is the world’s greatest exporter of bananas?”

Really pressing questions like that. It doesn’t matter where I am. I just pull out my phone and I search for it. It’s about wanting to know more, and it’s about wanting to find solutions and answers to these questions. From a corporate standpoint, Konica Minolta has done a lot of work about that. We have wonderful products and services that are really geared towards maximizing collaboration, productivity, and efficiency in the workplace. It’s all these technologies that are reshaping work processes.

Just like with our IT services, our information management services, as financial services professional or manage print services where you can reduce costs and optimize efficiency with your printing. All different things we’re doing come from a need to make the business world better.

When I think of the curiosity that successful trivia players have, it’s the same kind of curiosity that makes companies – ours in particular – want to do the best work for our customers.

John: Yeah, no, that’s exactly it. It’s funny, because when you were in business school or getting your master’s in marketing, no one said “Hey, go join a trivia team, because it’ll make you better at your job.”

Nick: No. I hadn’t really realized it until about a year ago. That’s when kind of the puzzle pieces started coming together. I was like, oh, wow. This does really help me. This is a really good thing I’m doing. It’s instilled a sense of confidence, and it’s instilled a sense of happiness and just a sense of fun that I bring to my daily life, especially when I’m at work.

People like people that are happy and that bring a real positive energy to the workplace. I feel that trivia has really helped me do that.

John: Absolutely. I mean, you get that energy. You get that passion. You recharge your batteries. Then when you come back into work, yeah, you’re not drained. You’re alive. Then especially when you put that on the side of your cubicle, on that whiteboard – I love that, man. That’s so fantastic, because that’s inviting people into your world of “This is what I love to do. Come on it. Let’s make some magic” type of thing.

That’s great. Every week, you got a new thing. I’m sure that if on a Monday, you forget to put something up, people are like “Hey, where’s the question?”

Nick: There are people that have looked around the corner and are like “Is it a new question? Is there a new question?” Hold on, hold on.

John: Exactly. That’s so great. I love that Konica Minolta is open to that. Not that they wouldn’t be necessarily, but you never know.

Nick: Well, speaking to the story you told about when you told your coworker that you did comedy that one day – people knowing about my trivia passion came about when – right after we won in Atlantic City, it was over a weekend. One of my coworkers who worked in the communications department asked me how my weekend was, and I was like “Oh, it was good. We went down to Atlantic City, my friends and I.”

He was like “Oh? What’d you do?”

There was a part of me I will admit that was hesitant, because I was like “Do I tell him?” Because I was sort of new to Konica Minolta at the time. I didn’t really want to say anything that people would perceive negatively potentially. I was like, you know what? Let me just tell him.

I was like “We competed in a trivia tournament, and we won. We won the national championship.”

Each of us got a little plaque. I had the plaque in my cubicle. He’s like “Wow, that’s awesome. Would you like to be the employee spotlight for this month?” I was like, sure. I’d love to.

I did a little interview of me, and we did a couple pictures, so I was the employee spotlight for – actually, I don’t know if it’s been updated, but for the month following, I was the employee spotlight on the employee interface on the company website. That was just a really cool thing. That’s kind of how people started to know about that.

John: That’s huge, man. That’s so great. That’s really great. It’s also interesting that our default mode is to not share, because it’s not work-related. “I don’t know if I should tell them. I don’t know if they’re going to frown upon it….”

Nick: That’s exactly where I was, but then I thought, you know what? This is who I am as a person. Life’s too short and a career’s even shorter for you to hold back who you really are, because who are you not to bring your full, invigorated, passionate self to the workplace? How could you bring less than that every single day?

If that means people know stuff about you that you’re really into, then by all means, share it. That’ll help really form this beautiful picture of you. It’ll help them understand you, and it’ll form great bonds and synergies between you. That’s the key to the city, I think. That’s what really enables you and your coworkers to do the best work.

John: Right. Then you’re scared, but then when you do, all of a sudden, now, you’re on the employee spotlight. Now, everybody’s looking for your whiteboard question of the week. Now, all of a sudden, everybody knows who you are. It’s like, whoa. You’re on a rollercoaster, in a good way. I love the employee spotlight idea. Is it always somebody’s hobby, passion, something they love to do outside of work?

Nick: It is. Yeah. One of my coworkers, she sings in a choir. Another thing she’s done recently is she’s taken up curling. We actually have a local curling club in Westchester County. I think she saw the Olympics and she saw how popular curling was just with the US men winning the gold, and she was like, hmm, maybe I’ll try that. She has gotten into it. That’s what she does now.

John: That’s great.

Nick: Then we have someone who does voiceovers and people who have all sorts of interesting hobbies. It’s not just in our Ramsey office. It’s just all around the country, too. Anything to really share who these people are outside of work. They’re not just your coworkers. They’re people you should know. They’re people you know, and they’re people you could definitely learn a lot from and that you definitely should get to know better, because they’re cool, because they’re loving life. Everybody should love life.

John: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. It’s something that you never know if someone else also does that. Then it’s explosion, and it’s like, wow. But even if they don’t, they’re still interested in it, and it’s how you’re going to be remembered. Because the other people that – you’re able to name all these people quickly because of their interests outside of work, but then there’s hundreds of people that you work around that you don’t know that about, and they’re completely forgettable. That’s what’s really scary to me when I speak to firms in conferences all over is hey, everybody, you’re working really hard. You might want to leave a lasting memory for people to remember you.

Unless you’re Milton from office space and hanging onto the swingline stapler. Other than that – you’re just a normal person, so let it out. I love what you said. There’s a person behind that coworker.

Nick: Exactly. We’re all marketing people. Inherently, we want to connect with other people. On behalf of the brand, we’re marketing, or on behalf of ourselves. Inherently, I think if we can just find something within ourselves to really share with one another and really kind of solidify a bond beyond the typical work relationship, that’s what’s really going to contribute like I said to like a really strong culture – one that’s focused on effectiveness. Not so much efficiency, but effectiveness, and just really accomplishing long-term goals in the best way.

John: Right. No, that’s awesome, man. That’s so great. Do you have any words of encouragement to others, or anything else that you want to add before I run you through the 17 rapid-fire questions?

Nick: If you have something interesting about you, if you do something fun, let people know about it. Don’t hold it back. Because like I said, life’s too short, and you’re career’s even shorter. If you’re going to be spending most of your time doing something, make sure that it’s something you enjoy, and then also make sure that you have interests and passions outside of work that you love doing, because it doesn’t just enhance the scope of your life, it enhances your career, as well, because it really brings people back to the workplace.

You’re more than just a professional, somebody getting paid for what they do. You’re a human being. That’s what people are going to remember. They’re going to remember that thing about you, and they’re going to remember the connection that they made with you and you made with them because of that.

John: Yeah, man. That’s awesome. You’re proof positive that your gut instinct and your default is to not share, and then when you do, wow. I should have been doing this all along. No, that’s so encouraging, man. But before I fly back east and we go hang out and do some trivia, I like to run everybody through my 17 rapid-fire questions just to make sure that we’re going to be hanging out for an evening – let’s make sure that we’re simpatico – there’s your Spanish right there for you.

Let me fire this thing up, and here we go. Here we go.

All right. I’ll start you with an easy one. What’s your favorite color?

Nick: Purple. Like a deep purple.

John: Okay. All right. How about a least favorite color?

Nick: Yellow.

John: Oh, nice. All right. How about are you more of a PC or a Mac?

Nick: I was weaned on PC, so I guess I’ll say PC.

John: PC. All right. When it comes to a mouse, are you more of a right-click or a left-click?

Nick: Left-click.

John: Left-click. Making decisions.

Nick: Absolutely.

John: Do you have a favorite Disney character?

Nick: I really like the stingray from Finding Nemo.

John: Okay. That’s great, man. That’s really good. Are you more Star Wars or Star Trek?

Nick: Star Wars.

John: Okay. All right. Are you more pens or pencils?

Nick: Pens. I’m a sucker for cool pens.

John: Cool pens. All right. For puzzles, more Sudoku or crossword?

Nick: I like crossword. I like words.

John: Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. What’s a typical breakfast?

Nick: When I have it, eggs. Anything with eggs.

John: Okay. All right. All right. Are you more suit and tie or jeans and a t-shirt?

Nick: I actually like suiting up. I like the suit and tie.

John: Nice. Yeah. Absolutely. How about do you have a movie that makes you cry?

Nick: Well, going off of Disney Pixar again, I have to say Up.

John: Oh, yeah. That’s a good answer. Do you have a favorite number?

Nick: Seventy-seven.

John: Seventy-seven. Why is that?

Nick: Well, I like the number seven. It’s lucky. And I like the way it’s shaped. I figure if you like something, why not have it twice?

John: Why not double up, right? Exactly. How about do you have a favorite band or musician?

Nick: Yes. Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats.

John: Okay. Very good. How about a favorite comedian?

Nick: Oh, John Garrett, of course.

John: You clearly do not listen to a lot of comedy. Would you say you’re more of an early bird or a night owl?

Nick: Night owl.

John: Night owl. Nice. How about do you have a favorite ice cream flavor?

Nick: Anything chocolate and/or peanut butter.

John: Okay. We can do that. We can do that. The last one – do you have a favorite thing you own or the favorite thing you have?

Nick: Yeah, that would be my grandparents’ spoon collection. I’m actually looking at it right now. I’m in my kitchen, and there it is, hanging on the wall.

John: That’s fantastic, man. Really cool. Well, thanks so much, Nick, for taking time to be with me on the Green Apple Podcast. This was really fantastic.

Nick: Oh, thank you, John. I had a great time. It was just a pleasure. Thank you again.

John: Oh, wow. I loved how Nick said everybody brings something unique to the team. If you harness those passions and talents, you can maximize your effectiveness as a team. If we begin to define our expertise as more than a college degree and those certifications, those letters after our names, then it’s easy to see how vital this really, really is.

If you’d like to see some pictures of Nick at the Trivia National Championships and connect with him on social media, be sure to go to greenapplepodcast.com. All the links are there. While you’re on the page, please click that big green button and do the anonymous research survey about corporate culture.

Thanks again for subscribing to the show and for sharing this with your friends so they get the message that we’re all trying to spread, which is to go out and be a green apple.