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 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 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 in his creative endeavors.
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 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 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. 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, 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 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.
You know what.
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, 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.
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
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 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 trying to create. How does it help, I guess, boost your creativity when it comes to cooking.
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.
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 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
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 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.
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