Steve Schlafman: Venture Capital, Chronic Pain, Creativity

Steve Schlafman (0:00)

In my work as a coach, I spend time with the people I partner with to think about like inner resources, and that we all have resources internally, and attributes and skills that we can tap into in the future to get through certain situations.

And so for me, what I'm trying to do through this whole experience is remember the resilience and the patience and all of these, what I would call inner resources. And I've been trying to almost like bottle them up such that when I find adversity or I need adversity down the road, whether it's professionally or personally, I can think back to this experience and almost use this experience as a catalyst to get through other hard times.

Stewart Alsop III (0:53)

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. Today's interview is with Steve Schlafman, a investor and coach in NYC. It's a great interview. And before I talk about this interview specifically, I just want to address something that's come up in general. And it's kind of a philosophy that I do this show with.

And I believe that there are experts in specializations in specialized fields domain. I do not believe that there are any experts at life.

This is why the term life coach is so difficult for me to work with, because that would assume that one person knows how to live their life better than the other person. And you know, maybe that's true. But ultimately, I don't believe there are experts at life. And so I ask a lot of questions on the show of people who might not have expert answers to those questions. But I want to hear their answers anyway. So I just want to make it clear that if you're tuning in to the show, please do it with beginner's mind.

I ask that of all the guests on the show, I ask that of myself.

To the mind of the expert, there are very few possibilities. And in the mind of the beginner, there are almost unlimited possibilities. So please, let's take beginner's mind whenever we're listening to this episode or doing anything for that matter. I find it's a helpful thing. Even if you are an expert, it's a great way to look at a problem from a novel viewpoint when you look at it from a beginner.

So with that in mind, hopefully you enjoy this episode with Steve. Steve suffered an accident just a few weeks before we started recording, and he has a lot to say about stress and creativity. He also did a Vipassana meditation retreat previous to that as well. So he has a lot of interesting things to say about this subject.

And I do want to make it clear that I am offering an online course for startup founders at their Seed Stage or Series A stage. My friend Anders Jones is the CEO of Facet Wealth, and he's raised $40 million in his Series A. We're going to do an online course, a live online training where people can sign up beforehand and get access to Anders and his wisdom about how to raise money for a Series A or a Seed Stage. Also, he's on the cusp of hyper growth, and I've always found it valuable to find the wisdom of people who have done it recently in the last year or two years and find out what is currently working for them. And so that's the goal of this online course with Anders Jones is to find out what is working for him and put that out there so that early stage founders can understand a little bit more about how to how to win and how to win in 2019 So if you are interested in that it is application only. And you can find out more by subscribing to my blog at steward alsop.substack.com again that's steward alsop.substack.com. And I'll be including more information and an application you can find there. So please let me know what you think about this episode. Steve was a great guest. It's a lot of wise things to say. Welcome everyone to the crazy wisdom podcast. My guest here is Steve Schlafman and he is the Partner and Leadership Coach at Primary Venture Partners. He also had a surgery recently on his shoulder. So and has a lot to say about stress and the relationship to creativity and also started a podcast or wanted to start a podcast and then we're going to get into the backdrop to that. Really excited to talk with you, Steve. Thank you for coming on.

Steve Schlafman (4:21)

Yeah, pleasure to be here. So great to be with you.

Stewart Alsop III (4:25)

So yeah, let's talk about this right before the show. We're getting into a little bit about how you had this experience of chronic pain and which I was sharing that I also had and is one of the impetuses for this podcast.