How Ben Shewry protects his creative passion amid growing success

Executive overview

Success pulls founders and creatives away from the work that created their success in the first place. The demands multiply — meetings, staff, media — while the core craft gets squeezed out.

Ben Shewry's answer is deliberate: protect time for cooking above everything else, and cultivate broad interests outside your main discipline to stay creatively sharp.

The more successful you become, the harder it is to do the thing that made you successful.

Returning to the core craft

• As demands multiply, the original passion gets crowded out by management and admin
• Shewry treats cooking as non-negotiable — it must happen daily, even if the time shifts
• When the restaurant kitchen isn't available early enough, he starts ideas at home
• The format has evolved over three years: flexibility in where and when, not whether
• Naming the priority out loud helps — "I need to cook today" overrides the inbox

Breadth of interests as a creativity engine

• Having interests outside your main discipline opens access to different worlds and people
• Shewry cites travel, music, skateboarding, and art as sources outside cooking
• T-shaped people — deep expertise plus broad interests — consistently outperform specialists on creative tasks
• The breadth provides cross-domain inputs that narrow specialists can't draw on

Music as a creative and operational tool

• Music functions as a mood-setter and energy amplifier, not just background noise
• Before service, the kitchen plays loud, intense music — the equivalent of a locker-room pre-game
• Attica is equipped with stereos throughout so every person can access music independently
• Shewry uses music to soundtrack his own creative process when cooking
• The restaurant attracts touring musicians as guests, deepening the connection between food and music