Tommy Leep of AngelList

Hi, my name is Stuart Alsop, and this is my podcast, Crazy Wisdom, where I interview creative people about how they work with and manage the stress that is inherent in creative work. What I've realized over the past 10 years of my research is that anybody who is creating something of value that is significantly different from what has come before is considered crazy. Most of us have a fear, an ingrained fear of going crazy. So what I'm saying is grab onto that fear, realize that it's there, and just go with it. Because the problems we're going to be facing over the next 20 years require crazy people in order to solve them. Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. My guest here is Tommy Leap. He invests in startups with his firm Jetstream, and He also does BD at AngelList. And we're here to talk about creativity and stress within the context of how people find jobs and how they find their life's work. So welcome to the show, Tommy.

Thanks for having me, Stuart.

Yeah, so let's get right into it about stress and creativity. Do you have a definition of stress or what's your definition of creativity? How do you view them playing a role together?

Yeah, sure. So with creativity, I think of it in a way as deviations from kind of standard thinking. So, you know, we have kind of a context of, you know, thinking within bounds to be safe in a lot of ways, particularly in a professional setting. And so kind of when I think of creative solutions or people who are creative, think of people who have found ways to go outside of those bounds, outside of those constraints, and come up with solutions that are new, novel, bring us outside of ourselves in a way. And then as far as stress goes, I think of stress as a constraint, usually as some. Some expectation we have that might be either due to time or due to pressures from other people or from society or kind of like physical things and, you know, create creative thinking creatively or creativity in regards to stress, to me, is basically coming up with ways to either quickly get to solutions or solve problems that in a way can, like, circumvent or go outside the bounds of those constraints.