Quick Win: Ben Shewry’s secret to staying creative with a busy schedule

The big catch with a creative business is that the more successful you get, the more your creative endeavour can feel like a chore instead of a passion. But what if there was one thing you could do to ensure the passion stays?

Ben Shewry is head chef and owner of multi-award winning Melbourne restaurant, Attica. Attica has been featured several times in the The World's 50 Best Restaurants and has been named the Best Restaurant in Australia. He is also the author of bestseller Uses for Obsession, a memoir about Ben’s experiences in hospitality.

With all of this success and all these projects, Ben has definitely found more demands on his time, and yet he still manages to keep that joy and passion with his creative work.

Ben shares:

• 🎭 Why becoming successful could make it harder to do your creative passion
• 🔥 A simple way you can ensure the passion stays with your creative projects
• 🎶 How to use music to help your creative process

Listen to the full interview with Ben here.

Connect with Ben on Instagram or read his book Uses for Obsession.

 

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Credits:

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The big catch with a creative business is that the
more successful you get, the more it can feel like
a chore instead of a passion. But what if there
was one thing you could do to ensure the passion stays.
Ben Shuri is head chef and owner of multi award
winning Melbourne restaurant Attica, a restaurant that has been featured
several times on the world's Top fifty Restaurant list. With

(00:24):
all of this success and all these projects, Ben has
definitely found demands on his time, and yet he still
manages to keep that joy and passion with his creative work.
But how exactly does he do this? Welcome to How

(00:46):
I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for
optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. On
today's quick Win episode, we go back to an interview
from the past and I pick out a quick win
that you can apply today. In my chat with Ben,
he reveals his simple process for ensuring the passion stays

(01:10):
in his creative endeavors.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
I think for me it's essential, and I think this
is for any person that's had a small amount of
success in any kind of business or any walk of life,
an evocation is to keep continuing to return to that
original love and almost sort of in a way that
you know, the more successful you become, the more distracted

(01:37):
you can get. And we all know this, and the
more things that are demanding our attention but are actually
dragging us away from the thing that we did that
brought us the success in the first place. So for me,
it's about returning to cooking constantly and cookings what has
made me successful. And of course the demands on my

(01:57):
time are so many now, from poc casts like this,
to requirements of staff, to running a company with forty employees,
to all of the other things that I do in
my life, have a family. I need to keep returning
to cooking. So it's about finding new ways to return
to cooking and not just staying in the format, which
was I turned up at the restaurant at nine am.

(02:19):
By ten am, I'm cooking now. Sometimes I can't cook
at ten am. Sometimes it's not till twelve. Sometimes it
doesn't allow enough time to see an idea through in
the rest of the day till five when the service
starts in the restaurant. So sometimes I need to work
on the idea at home, or the idea starts off
in the home kitchen as an idea for a dinner party,

(02:40):
and then it eventually makes its way onto the outer communia.
So in the last three years that's sort of how
I've evolved that process. But I've realized fundamentally that thing
that brings me the most joy in the thing that
I need to protect is cooking and my ability to
do it. And of course I'm going to come back
to that idea of the more successful will you become
the hard redded is to do the thing that made

(03:01):
you successful. So I always remind myself of that and
I think it makes me feel really good as well
to be able to go.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
You know what.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
I know, there's one hundred emails there, there's an Instagram
post you've got to do, there's a meeting, somebody needs
your help, and external of the restaurant. But I do
need to cook today and I need to make that
time and get organized to do it. Another thing that
helps me hugely is having a lot of interests and
different interests than your occupation or what your passion is,

(03:29):
because it opens you up to a different world. And
so whether it's travel or listening to music for me,
or skateboarding or art or whatever it might be. It
doesn't matter, really, it's just about having a different sort
of experience with a different group of people.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
I love that. I don't know if you've heard the
theory around I shape versus T shaped people. It used
to be talking about quite a lot in innovation circles,
where you've got your I shape people that are experts,
have deep expertise in one particular area, and then you've
got your T shape people that have that xpertise that
but then they've also got the top of the tea
where they've got that breadth of like different interests outside

(04:06):
of that main interest. And when I was and you know,
the research would suggest that T shaped people are quite
a bit more creative than I shape people, which kind
of makes sense. And when I was reading Uses for
Obsession and just learning about all these different areas that
you've gone so deep in, it's like, no won day

(04:27):
you're so incredibly creative. I do want to ask about
music because that's clearly a passion, and I love that
you actually created Spotify and playlists that go with the book.
That's awesome. How does music help with your creativity and
what I mean by that, Like, you know, I've spoken
to various creative people around how they'll use music to
get in a certain mood for whatever it is they're

(04:50):
trying to create. How does it help, I guess, boost
your creativity when it comes to cooking.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
Music's kind of everything, you know, it's a soundtrack for
my life, and I'll soundtrack my life and almost every
moment always to music in the kitchen as well. It's
a way that traditionally chefs have sort of lifted their
energy at the end of the day, right before service.
I write about that experience. It's almost like a sporting
team in the locker room before going out into the pitch.

(05:18):
The last hour before the restaurant opens. We amplify ourselves
as we set up frantically for the first guest arriving
at six o'clock with music, sometimes quite intense music, very
loud music. It's something that happens with or without me,
you know, in fact, mostly without me. You know, I'm
mostly an observer to the kitchen using this as a

(05:39):
mechanism to get themselves in the right headspace. So at Ataka,
there's you know, a joke that it has the most
stereos of any restaurant in the world. This is pretty
much a stereo in every room, so every person in
the organization can be listening to music if they want to.
You know, I just can't imagine creating without it, really,
you know, I think it's such a useful tool, and

(06:00):
I always feel so indebted to artists. Another sort of
very cool kind of fact in restaurants is that, especially
creative restaurants, it attracts a lot of musicians, and so
we get to serve and cook for musicians and sometimes
become friends with them, especially touring musicians, and that's such
a beautiful thing. I would say that sometimes it creates
fair bit of nervousness with the playlist in terms of

(06:24):
will they like it, And in fact, sometimes you know,
famous musicians come and their music might be on the playlist,
and I almost feel bad about that because I don't
want to make them feel uncomfortable. But it's the greatest pleasure,
you know. I think it's such a gift music.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
I hope you enjoyed this quick Win episode with Ben.
If you would like to listen to the full interview,
you can find a link to that in the show notes.
If you like today's show, make sure you get follow
on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
the warrangery people, part of the Cooler Nation