David speaks with Thatcher Wine, a creative entrepreneur, writer and book curator. He is the Founder & CEO of Juniper Books, a company that creates custom book collections and designs special book sets. He is the author of The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better that provides a clear and accessible plan for life in the 21st century and also the coauthor of For the Love of Books: Designing and Curating a Home Library.
They talked about:
📚 The evolving role of books in modern life
🏛️ Creating custom libraries for celebrities
⏰ Finding time to read in a busy world
💫 The art of book curation
🧠 The power of monotasking
📱 Breaking free from digital distractions
🎙 Listen in your favourite podcast player
🎧 Listen on Spotify:
📹 Watch on Youtube:
👤 Connect with Thatcher:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatcherwine/
Website: https://www.thatcherwine.com/about
📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
03:00] The connection between samurai culture and modern book collecting
[06:00] The founding story of Juniper Books
[11:00] Designing custom book collections
[14:00] Managing physical book collections with limited space [19:00] The challenge of BookTok and reading burnout
[22:00] Developing healthy reading habits
[25:00] Managing attention and time effectively
[29:00] The importance of disconnecting from phones
[34:00] Tools for better focus and productivity
[37:00] Preview of upcoming book about The Quilted Giraffe
[39:00] Book recommendations
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Juniper Books | https://juniperbooks.com
Gwyneth Paltrow | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwyneth_Paltrow
Shonda Rhimes | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shonda_Rhimes
The Twelve Monotasks | https://amzn.to/4hpRK85
For the Love of Books | https://amzn.to/4hkM27k
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain | https://amzn.to/4hJWx3Z
Kurt Vonnegut | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse Five | https://amzn.to/413w6Az
Cat's Cradle | https://amzn.to/3Q5bu4C
Breakfast of Champions | https://amzn.to/433jVp9
The Quilted Giraffe Restaurant | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quilted_Giraffe
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge
🌐 Website: https://www.davidelikwu.com
📽️ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/davidelikwu
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/delikwu/
🕺 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@delikwu
🎙️ Podcast: http://plnk.to/theknowledge
📖 EBook: https://delikwu.gumroad.com/l/manual
My Online Course
🖥️ Career Hyperdrive: https://maven.com/theknowledge/career-hyperdrive
Career Hyperdrive is a live, cohort-based course that helps people find their competitive advantage, gain clarity around their goals and build a future-proof set of mental frameworks so they can live an extraordinary life doing work they love.
The Knowledge
📩 Newsletter: https://newsletter.theknowledge.io/
The Knowledge is a weekly newsletter for people who want to get more out of life. It's full of insights from psychology, philosophy, productivity, and business, all designed to help you think deeper and work smarter.
My Favorite Tools
🎞️ Descript: https://bit.ly/descript-de
📨 Convertkit: https://bit.ly/convertkit-de
🔰 NordVPN: https://bit.ly/nordvpn-de
💹 Nutmeg: http://bit.ly/nutmegde
🎧 Audible: https://bit.ly/audiblede
📜Full transcript:
Thatcher Wine: [00:00:00] We can train ourselves to do almost anything by like starting small, setting the intention, repeating it every day, checking in and reevaluating like what's working, what's not working.
Disassociating everything from your phone, whether it's like listening in a conversation or driving somewhere or learning something new. Put your phone down. I mean, you might be learning on there, but if you can just kind of like untether yourself, put your phone in a drawer in another room, learn how to go for a walk without it and realize that the world doesn't end. And then, do that one activity with your full attention, try to repeat that process every day.
This week I'm sharing the second part of my conversation with Thatcher Wine, who is the CEO and founder of Juniper Books and he's also a serial author, written a few incredible books such as The Twelve Monotasks and also For the Love of Books, which has a great cover. I would highly recommend picking it up.
So I would definitely recommend [00:01:00] going back and listening to the first part of our conversation, but you can also feel free to jump right in here. In this part, you're going to hear us talking about the role of books in our lives and the sense in which books have begun to transcend simply their functional use and actually begin to take on other properties in our lives as vessels for memories, as ornaments, as things that hold some aspirational value as representations of the values and ideas that we want to share and communicate with others.
We also talk about the curation of home libraries. What does it take? What goes into it? And how Thatcher himself learned to curate home libraries for celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Shonda Rhimes. We talked about the founding journey behind Juniper Books, what led him there, all the various steps along his path.
And then we talked about the intersection between reading and productivity. We talk about how to find more time to read, how to create meaning in our tasks and this concept of monotasking and how it can help us to [00:02:00] create more room for the things that matter and help us apply ourselves more meaningfully to the work that we do.
So overall, this was a really fun and fantastic episode. I would highly recommend listening to both parts of this conversation. It was a ton of fun getting to speak with Thatcher.
You can get the full show notes, the transcript and read my newsletter at thenowledge. io. You can find Thatcher online on Instagram @ThatcherWine and his website is thatcherwine. com. We'll have links to all his stuff and all his books in the show notes and in the description.
And if you love this episode, please do share it with a friend and don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it's on Spotify or Apple Podcasts because it helps us tremendously to find other listeners just like you.
Connecting Samurai Culture to Books
David Elikwu: Yeah, there's another connection that just came to mind as you were saying that, which had never occurred to me before, but it is similarly interesting and you can tell me whether or not this resonates with you in any way, what you were saying now just reminded me that in Japan, very often [00:03:00] you hear people talk today about how they love the idea of samurai and this, you know, samurai have this place in popular culture that, wow, you know, they were so cool. They did this, they did that. There's recent shows like Shogun that are incredible and they show all these great samurai.
But I think what's interesting is if you look historically, most of samurai becoming cool was after the time that samurai were actually useful or needed, right? So you actually had the warring states period where you had, these samurai were basically just mercenaries, right? They were just hired hands that became kind of like, nobility in a sense, but really a big part of their role was, you know, rounding up rabble rousers. And, you know, if you were a particular Lord, you would send out your samurai to go and, you know, kill some people or go and take care of certain things. And so you had that period of time, but then what happened is you then enter a period of unparalleled peace, the Tokugawa era, that you haven't had this kind of peace before, where you're not having war all the time. And so the swords, the swords and the tea and all these things that previously had a functional purpose [00:04:00] became almost ceremonial. And now suddenly you have all these tea ceremonies and you have the sword that has this reverent place in the home. You have this little stand for the sword. And so there's a lot of the things, the iconography that we look at when we think of this period of time mostly comes from the time after the time.
It's really the time where it then became a ceremonial, a lot more purposeful. It was this thing that there was ceremonies around the swords and you pass down the sword, Daniel, your family, your lineage, because at this point in time, samurai were no longer out there fighting for the majority of time. There were mostly just nobles. They were just, you know, now became part of the upper class and they were mostly indoors. And so you kind of needed all these things to keep the lore alive, right. And so the lore of the past stories of these great people now just became embedded in these artifacts.
And so, all of that to say, I think there's a similar sense in which I wonder that books have taken on a similar role.
The Ornamental Nature of Books
David Elikwu: You see on Instagram and on places where people post their [00:05:00] coffee table books and I don't even know if some people have ever even opened any of those books but they are just things that you buy so that people see them when they come over for dinner or something and they say, oh, you have this how cultured or you have books in your zoom background or something like that. And so it's strange how in a similar books can take on a sort of ornamental nature when most of the time, day to day are not actually reading, but the books, instead of having some functional place become ornamental in a sense, and they, they're more useful for what they signify them for what you actually use them for.
But I think, and I'd love to hear more about, like your friends say, Oh, you know, how were you so prescient to know to start Juniper Books? But I'd love to hear more about, first of all, maybe even the business that you started before that, that didn't do well.
Thatcher's Business Journey
David Elikwu: I'd love to hear about some of the circumstances around that, but then also going into founding this company, why, and what made you think that it was useful or purposeful to, to think about books in a particular way, to want to design beautiful covers for books and have beautiful collections of [00:06:00] books. I think you even have a patent for designing custom book covers in a particular way. And so I'd love to hear more about that thought process. And then I think that will then, there's a link that I later want to draw to some of what you talk about in your most recent book as well.
Thatcher Wine: It's a really fascinating conversation, we're covering a lot of good ground. So going back to, you know, some of the things I've done over my career. So, the most current iteration of Juniper Books is, is this 80 percent of the company roughly is like about making special edition book sets of essentially the series that people know and love. The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter's of the world. And kind of giving people a special edition that's beautiful, collectible, looks great on the shelf. And I will say, it also feels beautiful in your hands, and I will say, like, I'm a big believer that like, you don't have to read all the books you have in your home, like, you shouldn't feel bad about that. Some of it can definitely be aspirational, right? So, the coffee table books, or the books on your shelf. Like, if you want to project the image that you've [00:07:00] read them, and you might read them, you hope to read them, and if the main hurdles like, lack of time, and inability to, like, sit down and read them. And you just hope to read them in your retirement or something.
I think that's fine. I don't think there's, you know, we should feel bad about that. And to be honest, like, more have some self interest in this, obviously, but the more books that there are in the world, the better the world is. Like, there's a better chance that people will understand, you know, and have empathy, and know about history. And also, they're supporting authors, and supporting publishers, and booksellers, and those are all good things for the world. So definitely, you know, have more books. I think that's, that's a good thing for all of us.
And how I got into the business? It was, it was not a business decision. It was a hobby. So I had been, you know, in the tech business. I'd worked for like an early web developer in the nineties and built websites for some big companies and was like the business development guy kind of in the early internet 1.0. [00:08:00] And, you know, a lot of what I realized is like these companies were building their marketing sites and their sales sites to sell cars and advertise their restaurants or things like that, but they weren't really thinking about customer service. What was going to happen when they had a website and then everybody wanted to reach them and be like, Hey, is my warranty still valid? Or, you know, I had a problem with my blender. And so I left and I started a company, raised some venture capital, essentially have a customer service portal. It's called Feedback Direct at the beginning to basically send feedback to companies and kind of route all the communications to the appropriate people.
It's a little bit ahead of its time. It also turned out that like those companies didn't want an intermediary knowing their dirty laundry, you know, what was wrong with their products and what their customers are upset about. So my whole business model was predicated on like being that intermediary. And so in 2001, when a lot of internet companies were having trouble with funding, we decided to, you know, close up shop and I moved to Colorado.
And one of the things I started [00:09:00] doing was buying and selling rare books in first editions. I was able to take a little bit of time off and was, you know, kind of had my renaissance here. It was like making pottery and relearning French and writing screenplays. And one of the things that a friend of mine from college got me into was selling books. And back then it was all about putting them on eBay. And basically going to antique auctions and thrift stores and estate sales and, you know, developing my knowledge base about like what was the first edition, what was, you know, fine condition, what maybe was signed by the author, had some interesting provenance, you know, history of the book of who had owned it.
And then telling that story in the descriptions I wrote and put on eBay initially and then eventually some other rare book sites like AP E-books, a Libris and a little bit on Amazon. And it was super fun, I loved it. I mean it was just like research and storytelling and I was, I had a good knack for like finding kind of hidden gem and I would go buy, in that era there were also like a [00:10:00] lot of used bookstores that were going out of business. And I was like the young guy in a world of kind of grumpy old men in the book business. I was the young guy who was like had the energy and the willingness to like go buy 25,000 books when the store went out of business and picked through them and digitized the inventory and put it online.
So I had kind of a blast doing it. And then a few years into it a friend of a friend of the family had built a house and their architect had told them, you know, you should really have bookshelves in every room. And they were like, sure, we'll put bookshelves in every room. And then they were getting ready to move in. They were like, we don't own any books. And this is our beach house, our second house. Can we hire somebody to fill the shelves quickly and make it look like we had picked out the books?
Custom Libraries and Book Jackets
Thatcher Wine: And so I like interviewed them and developed this whole process of like, how do I curate a library for somebody else and kind of put myself in their shoes and their kids and the mom, dad, you know, the guests and all that, like what would I want on these shelves? And they're putting together 3, 000 books for that. So, not, not a problem that like [00:11:00] everybody has on a daily basis, right? Most people I know like don't have enough bookshelves and they have too many books. This was the opposite of that. And I loved the process of like, just channeling who they were and their personality and the design of their home. Like, should the books be brightly colored or, you know, oversized coffee table books or, you know, mixed in different rooms. They loved it. What I put together, their interior designer loved it. They started referring more clients to me. And I kind of made that my niche, you know, curating custom libraries.
A couple years into that, you know, people started asking for things that didn't really exist, right? They'd be like, can you, you know, get me the 500 most important novels ever written, but make them look pink? And I was like, well, my options are to rebind the books, but that that'll take like another 10 years and cost, you know, a fortune. And that's when I invented the book jackets. So I just started playing around with like a laser printer and you know folding jackets, different paper types, eventually graduated to like large format art printers [00:12:00] and specialty papers and laminates and all that. I do a lot of R& D. And so yeah we could make things. So if somebody's like, I want you know these trashy romance novels but I want them to look like an antique leather you know collection of Charles Dickens, we can do that. And then I started, like, making these images that go across the shelf. So, you know, for a hotel in Tennessee here, we did, like, a satellite image of Knoxville, Tennessee, across the shelves. And it's, like, 16 feet wide by 10 feet tall.
So really cool, fun, you know, ways. Those aren't really for reading. That's really just, like, an art installation. But it's a creative reuse of books that would otherwise go into the landfill. And then on the other opposite end of the spectrum, or more like the original first client, custom client I had, where, you know, people are reading every book and they're like looking at all the titles and they're like, how do you know that I would have picked this out, you know, if I had gone shopping and bought these books? And it's just like, I kind of used whatever empathy and understanding of, you know, if you like this, you'd like [00:13:00] that. But in the human way, not the Amazon way. It's just all in my brain to build these collections and then, I still do that all that custom stuff and then every year we launch like, 25 or 30 new products that are the book sets that are largely like very contemporary living active authors writing these popular series that I referred to before that like people just go crazy over and now they want like a limited edition or special edition. So we kind of make all those available to consumers worldwide.
David Elikwu: So you wrote this book for the love of books. And first of all, I must say you and, you know, Thatcher Wine and Elizabeth Lane are two of the most classical names to write a book like that. And the cover of the book looks beautiful. Everything about that book I love, but I'm interested in pretty much what you were just saying. And maybe I'll kind of take it in two directions. One, I think in that business you designed book collections for people like, Gwyneth Paltrow and Shonda Rhimes and a ton of incredible people. What does that process look like in terms of like what goes into [00:14:00] building a collection for people like that? But then also, connecting this to something we mentioned earlier, this idea of space, this idea of the preciousness. A lot of people don't have space, especially in today's world. Most people are complaining that they can't buy a house, or the place that they end up having to live in is too small, they don't have enough room. And that's even why a lot of people, including myself, might end up buying a lot more ebooks and audio books, because you don't have a tremendous amount of space to have all the physical books that you would like.
There's a great irony in me saying that I've got some books behind me here, but I've also got books downstairs in the hallway. And I've got some books in my room. I've got some books in my parents house. I think I've got some books in my sister's bedroom, you know, littered around every place that I've ever been, because I haven't brought them all into one place. I'm having to store my books in loads of different places.
So the other part of the question is, for the everyday person who wants to curate a collection of books, who wants to have some books, whether they're to read or to, to look at and aspire to read one day, how do you think people should be looking at books in, in [00:15:00] order to build a small library of their own?
Thatcher Wine: Yeah, I mean, I think the like idea of space constraints is a real issue and I think it's an opportunity rather than like a hindrance to having a collection that you want ideally. And there's a whole section in For the Love of Books about like, you know, how to get rid of books and how to decide whether to keep something. There's tips on, you know, at least in the U. S., like how to, you know, responsibly give them away to, you know, local organizations and libraries and all that, or sell them. But I think it's, you know, if you think about, we live in the physical world, there's not unlimited shelf space or physical space to keep everything, and we also, like, you know, we change over time. Like, something that was important to us when we were younger, like, you may decide, like, it's just not part of who we are today, and so it's time to give away that book, let somebody else, you know, have it.
So I think in, you know, I think in my own house, just in terms of, like, themes in different rooms or on different bookcases within the rooms. I'm in my home office, so, like, there's this research collection behind me about the book I'm writing on next, but [00:16:00] in the bookshelf to my left, you know, my collections of Kurt Vonnegut and Nick Cornby and Mark Twain and things like that, that I love. And, you know, so I think if you think thematically, whether it's just like one little shelf these are my favorite books or this is the room where I want to do all my reading about wellness and spirituality or I'm going to leave all my, you know, cookbooks and books about art and design at my parents house, things like that, you can start to kind of break apart the larger problem of like, my library into like, I have this collection and that collection and that collection. And then within those collections you can be like, Oh, you know, this is my favorite book. I'd really love a leather bound copy of it. So, upgrading a book within that. Or, you know, Oh, this is, I've got the five books in this series, you know, by Tolkien but, you know, two of them are in paperback, so, like, I'm going to upgrade those to hardcovers, or get the Folio Society edition, or the Juniper Books edition.
So you can, like, kind of make these micro decisions about things that are [00:17:00] important to you, giving away the things that you're just ready to let go of, and kind of honing in on, like, what are your interests? What's your, you know, what story do you tell about yourself? What story do you want to tell to the world? What do you want people to notice when they come over, maybe? Put those books, you know, front and center. I don't think that's superficial or egotistical or narcissistic or anything. Like, it's just like, this is who I am. Like, you're inviting people to ask you a question. I didn't know you were into French alternative cinema or whatever it may be, because you have a book on it. And that's a good thing. It's not a bad thing, but hopefully you really are interested in it. You've at least seen the movie.
So, you know, I think there are a lot of ways, I kind of describe it like DNA. It's like everybody's book collection is different. There's no two book collections that are the same. Like, even if they're the same hundred books, like they're arranged differently, different order. One person might be by color, alphabetical, by size, you know, horizontal, vertical. There's all sorts of variations and I cover that in my book too. And I think [00:18:00] that's like a great thing to know you're unique but that there's some common interests with other people and that you can kind of express your individuality through your book collection in your library.
David Elikwu: Funnily enough, just as you were [00:19:00] saying that, I was thinking of some of my coffee table books. I have some friends coming over later this evening and I think, you know, you can also have a blend, a balance, right. Where like the books I have on my coffee table are books that I do think in some way maybe represent, my curiosities and my personality, but they're also books I'm actually interested in and I don't think I you know I wasn't looking in some catalogue of where to find these things but each one maybe I found it in one place where I found in another place. Actually, no, one of them did come from a recommendation. It's called Addressing The Man and I Like, you know, I have some interest in fashion and clothing and things like that. And so that's an interesting book, which history, covers materials, it covers loads of things. And it's, it's a beautiful book. And then I have another, which is Sotheby's World of Wine. I found that on the street. That was one of, that's one of my best, best findings. You know, it's a beautiful book again, it covers the history and where find wine in loads of regions around the world. I happen to like wine. So there's that. And then there is, I forget the precise name, but it's a book of all the towns and counties in, around the United [00:20:00] Kingdom. And again, just a very random book, but I personally find that incredibly interesting. I want to go read about this random village in Wales and, you know, that's a book I have that, that I can read about that.
And so on one hand, it might be actually of some functional interest to me, but also it's something that I can have there and people can come across it and have some sense of, who's this person, whose house I'm in and what are they like and what are they interested in and things like that.
I wanted to make a bit of a connection here. It's a slight detour, but before you mentioned this idea of books having a bit of a renaissance period in our lives now and when you were saying that, what that made me think of was TikTok, right? And you mentioned romanticy and some of these things. This is where some books becoming popular now and you have, you know, BookTok on TikTok and then you have BookTube on YouTube and you have all these people recommending books, they're sharing their to be read list. But one thing that I found really interesting that seems to be more of a current trend is people feeling burnt out. Because their reading list is too long. They don't have enough [00:21:00] time. And these are people that supposedly love books. These are people that are hoarding books. These are people that are on Goodreads. Cataloging every single thing that they come across. But they get burnt out. They feel like they don't have enough time. And this maybe then connects back around to what you were mentioning in terms of like monotasking and this idea that I think in general, people, especially coming out of this pandemic period, people feel like, they don't have enough time, they're struggling with the responsibilities that they have, the aspirations that they have of wanting to have and own and read particular books. But how do you find the time to do these things?
The Art of Monotasking
David Elikwu: I'd love to hear you maybe explain or expand a bit more on this concept of monotasking and the role that it has in our lives and why it's useful, why people should care and how that helps people.
Thatcher Wine: So I think that, you know, the burnout and the sense of overwhelm is real, whether you're talking about like, I just have too many things to do around my house or I have too many books to read. Like it's essentially the same thing. Like we just tend to like something and then kind of, you know, hockey stick it and be like, I'm going to, [00:22:00] you know, do more and more and more and more and more. And then it's like, I don't have enough time and I'm not gonna do any of it. Or you, you know, develop a negative association with something that's otherwise good for you. So I think we have to recognize that, first of all, and just not put too much pressure on ourselves. There's only so many hours in the day. You don't have to read every single book. You definitely don't have to read books you don't like, right? So a lot of people are like, your friends on Goodreads or whatever are talking about it. And you're like, I don't like it, but I'm gonna persist, and I'd say just move on. There are too many books to read in our lifetimes.
But I think part of the key to reading anything is like developing at least a weekly habit. Ideally a daily habit of reading something on paper 15 minutes a day. Studies have shown like, 20 minutes is kind of like a magic number for like most people just can't do one thing for more than 20 minutes. So you have to like train yourself to be able to, you know, read for more than like two minutes, then 5 minutes, then 10 minutes, then 15 minutes. I find it really helpful to have like a specific place in my house to read. So I have a reading [00:23:00] chair right? And most productive and, you know, can read for the longest certain time of day. So just experiment, figure out, you know, what works for best. Best for you is like in the morning before everybody else gets up and you've really started checking your emails and kind of started the hamster wheel of your day or is it to wind down at night, or is it, you know, your lunch break? Instead of looking at your phone, like you read a book while you're eating your lunch, that's fine. It's multitasking, but it's, it's a healthy form of it.
So yeah, I think a lot of it's just about, like, you know, setting, in the New Year's, I would say, is like a good time to kind of develop, set a goal and a new healthy intention. So if you set a goal of, let's say, you know, reading 15 minutes a day, either maybe just starting on the weekends and then gradually adding weekdays. That would be super helpful and you'll be surprised by how quickly, you know, you can get through a book if you just chip away at it every day. And I think maybe for some people having like an accountability partner or joining a book [00:24:00] club can also be helpful. So you can decide if that's for you. Personally, you know, I'm more of just kind of a stack of books and, you know, grab the one, you know, one of the five that I'm working on at any given time and read that and I don't really want to have to, like, finish it by Friday to talk about it with somebody. So, you know, figure out what works for you.
Managing Attention and Time
David Elikwu: I think this is something that I personally have struggled with tremendously, particularly recently, even right before we got on this call, I was trying to look up some task management software and comparing all the options and watching all the YouTube videos so I can figure out, you know, how I'm going to wrangle all the various projects in my life. Because even I find it incredibly difficult. And I know that in the book, you talk about this idea that, part of it is training your attention span. It's not just that you'll wake up one day and magically you'll be able to manage all these things. But actually there's some iterative process by which you have to learn to get better at these things. But, maybe there's some balance of nature or nurture, I think you wake up every day without an alarm and you have a [00:25:00] regular nap every day at like, 1:30 or something like that. I cannot take any naps at all, I hate naps, I don't even like sleeping that much. And I will say there's two reasons.
One of this could just be, oh, I'm a workaholic or something like this. But the other reason, I think the deeper reason, and my friends can attest to this if any of them listen, it is very hard to wake me up. I wake up at a divinely appointed time. When I wake up, it's the time I've woken up. Very often this will be early, but I have almost no control of when that happens. If you are outside my door banging and knocking, I could, I might not hear a thing people have tried waking me up. It's not easy. And so if I take a nap. I think usually, and this is the problem, I might sleep for like four hours at a time. So let's say I go to bed and I, and then I wake up and it's been five or six hours. Okay, fine. That was a sleep. Now I'm awake. It's now the next day, you know, let's say I slept at 11 PM. Now it's half five in the morning. I'm ready to go. Let's, let's just do the day. Sometimes I wake [00:26:00] up a bit earlier, but the problem is sometimes I try to go back to bed and then I think it's going to be 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and then it's four hours. And then, so I just avoid it. So anyway, all of that rambling to say, you know, how do you think for other people trying to find this balance of, okay, how do I schedule my time? How do I manage my day? How do I manage and build my attention span? Not just for reading, but also to be able to attend more meaningfully to other areas of my life.
Thatcher Wine: So really good questions, and I think, you know, one thing recognizes like everyone's different. And a lot of it does come down to maybe, genetics and you know, habits growing up and things like that. So just like reading a book or listening to someone be like, Oh, like that, why doesn't that work for me? And being harder on ourselves is, is probably not going to result in a positive change, you know, that people want to make. That being said, I mean, I think we can train ourselves to do almost anything. And it just might take months or years. But you have to believe in, you [00:27:00] know, why you're, why you're doing it, right?
So, like, becoming a napper is not necessarily, like, a goal in itself. For me, like, I realized that over my life, like, I always enjoyed kind of coming home and taking a power nap. Like, more of a kind of 20 minute nap. And then it like it basically resetting my computer like shutting it down. Powering it back up. It was like everything works better. That was just like the way I felt about my brain and my productivity after a nap like, it was just a second day for me.
But you know the studies have shown like that only, for most people that only really happens if you take that power nap like, the 15 to 20 minute nap. If you get into deep sleep and REM sleep like, you get kind of groggy when you wake up if you don't sleep for the five or six hours. Like, if you sleep for one to two or three, like, it could have a negative impact. And I've seen it before because I'll just be exhausted and I'll fall asleep on a Saturday and I'll wake up an hour and a half later, I'm like, can I just go to bed? And it's like three o'clock in the afternoon. So, and [00:28:00] I'm not great at sleeping for 18 hours.
We can train ourselves to do almost anything by like starting small, setting the intention, repeating it every day, checking in and reevaluating like what's working, what's not working. And in the book, The Twelve Monotasks, you know, I talk about especially how to like do things without your phone. So like, what tends to happen is like you'll go down a path be like, I'm going to take a nap. Oh, well, I'm just going to look at my phone for a second. Oh, next thing you know, like I got to get back to my desk. Like in the time for napping is over. Same thing, I'm going to go for a walk, you know, I'm going to bring my phone and make a call. Then you're like, don't really notice anything. Don't necessarily get good exercise. You don't get the like relaxation of going for a walk out in nature.
So I think I talk in the book about like disassociating everything from your phone, whether it's like listening in a conversation or driving somewhere or learning something new. Like put your phone down. I mean, you might be learning on there, but if you [00:29:00] can just kind of like untether yourself, put your phone in a drawer in another room, learn how to go for a walk without it and realize that the world doesn't end. And then, you know, do that one activity with your full attention and try to repeat that process every day. And then by doing that, you build up what I call monotasking muscles and that they turn out to be kind of transferable. So the muscles you built by being able to listen in a conversation, but not be distracted by your phone and notifications and texts and all that, like turn out to be helpful when you're reading a book and the things that like the ability to sit still and pay attention while reading 20 pages in a book, turn out to be helpful, you know, when you want to learn how to play a new piece of music or learn a new language. And you can like just realize that there's this part of your brain that you're like reconnecting to be able to focus and pay attention.
David Elikwu: Yeah. I think you actually have inspired me to to try it and I know it's the kind of thing that people say a lot, oh try going without your phone, but I think it's not just the phone [00:30:00] It's the cascade of things that are connected to that because for example, I mentioned I walk a lot, but I walk and let's say I'm listening to a non fiction book. I'm walking, I have my airpods, I'm listening to a book while I'm walking, and then I'm holding my phone, maybe I'm taking notes, maybe I'm, you know, then getting distracted and going on Twitter. And so it's this combination of all these things. And so while I am, you know, paying attention to nature and trying to notice things, and there are times, a decent amount of time where I'm actually not on my phone, but it's just the closeness of it. It's almost has an attractor state, which gravitates me to get distracted and, and to go and do something and to fill spaces with attention.
And I think you mentioned something like this earlier, just this idea that sometimes very often, wherever we are, you could be on the train, you could be in the supermarket. The phone is the thing that you use to fill the space that you might otherwise be interacting with life. And in fairness, there is a part of this where people have always had this complaint, right? People said this about newspapers. Oh my gosh. Why is everyone, [00:31:00] they've got their head stuck in the newspaper when they can be interacting with people around them and blah, blah, blah. So, so fine. But I think, it's definitely doubly so now, because like, not only can I not hear you, I can't see you. I am completely in a, in a completely separate world and that can sometimes be useful but I haven't, yeah, I'm not fully experiencing leaving my phone at home. I haven't done that. I haven't done that. Or leaving my airport at home. I haven't done that. You know, I go out and I have all these things, even when I think I am paying attention, it always breaks. You know, I walk around for five minutes and then I check my phone. I just see what's going on and I do this little thing here and there.
And it's interesting how just not spending that much time completely alone with my thoughts without any utensils without any other things that could take my attention somewhere else. Like you say it kind of does steal away from your ability to then whether it's reading books or to pay attention in other areas as well.
Thatcher Wine: I think it can be helpful also to like, make a list, [00:32:00] like make some notes, like we were talking about before. Not in this case about a book, but like, you know, what is it you're actually worried about if you don't take your phone? Like, that you're going to get in an accident, get injured, you know, your kids are going to need to reach you. Like, you're going to miss an important business call, like just name it, write it down on paper. Maybe. You know assign a probability to it like is that you know, what are the odds that when I go for this 15 minute walk that that happens? And then I can't do anything about it. And you know recognize like, again, you know go back in history like for thousands of years, you know, millions of years whatever like, I mean, you did you couldn't respond instantaneously to everything so just because we can right now and you can find out about something like, doesn't mean that it's Better or that it's essential. So I think like letting go of those kind of connections to the outside world for a little while and just like going inward and internal you know, can be really helpful.
Obviously if you're like a doctor on [00:33:00] call, you can't do that or you can't do it at certain times. But there are certain times you can. And I think it's, it's worth doing that and it's just like, you kind of like rebuild some of your own, just psychological, emotional integrity and physical integrity too, to untether yourself from everything else for a little while.
David Elikwu: Yeah, maybe one of the last questions that I'll ask is, do you have, I mean, you know, first of all, we've identified there's this problem, loads of people have this problem. There's kind of two ways you'd go about it. Addition and also subtraction. Subtraction is do less, leave the phone, you know, remove some of these things.
But then addition, which is probably what most people gravitate towards is what is the new app that I must use, or what is the new extra thing that I could have in my life? I'd love to know maybe, the simplest recommendation that you have for someone listening to this in both directions, perhaps, is there anything that you do add in your life or use as a tool to help you be more focused [00:34:00] and to do one particular thing at a time? Is there, you know, something you would add? And then is there something, subtract, you've mentioned the phone, is there anything else that, or, or a particular way of thinking of how we can, by removing something, gain better attention and have more focus and be able to attend to tasks in a much better way.
Thatcher Wine: Yeah, I mean, as far as something I add like, it's adding to subtract a certain step, but like, you know, email is one of my problems. I mean I get way too many emails, like a lot of people, and feel like I need to at least look at them. I added a Gmail, you know, whatever they call it, app extension I think it's called SANE, S A N E, and it basically, like, sorts out, you know, all the spam, and you can train it. So, I try to use that to, like, cut down on the number of emails that I have to read. And it's worked a fair amount. Some stuff, you know, gets put in spam or whatever that shouldn't, but for the most part, like, it increases my efficiency to be able to see things that are important.
And as far as taking things [00:35:00] away you know, I basically find the tools that kind of work for me and my business and then stick to those and I try not to keep adding things. It's interesting like when you run a business and everybody else is, you know, has different kind of mindsets about this and they're like, you know, we should use Slack and we should use, you know, this AI tool and this marketing automation that, and at first you're like, oh, I'm so glad that they're like out there looking at all these things and evaluating them. But like, there's a certain susceptibility to just like, it's a shiny new object and everyone else is doing it, so we should do it. Like a lot of other people, companies, you know, we explored ChatGPT, chatbots and stuff. I just thought the writing was terrible and cheesy and I could, you know, tell if something was written by AI every time. Maybe it'll get better, but like, I didn't find a real business case for like, being the kind of company that we are. Literary with attention to detail and creativity and all that, like, where it made sense.
So, you know, we kind of we'll add something like that and then [00:36:00] take it away or find an appropriate use for it, which I think these days for us it's like, you know, using the note taker option on our calls so that people who weren't on the call or some people couldn't remember what we decided, like, could just go back and look at Otter, you know, AI to read the notes and the summary of the call.
So that can be put to appropriate use and not, you know, like running your whole life, like can be effective.
David Elikwu: Is there anything you can or would like to share about your upcoming book?
Upcoming Book on The Quilted Giraffe
David Elikwu: The one that you're working on now?
Thatcher Wine: Yeah, I mean, it's so like I mentioned, I grew up in New York City. My parents had a famous restaurant called the Quilted Giraffe. My dad was the chef. He was actually a lawyer turned chef. So, interesting career change. My mom ran the front of the house, took the reservations and ran the dining room. And they opened it when I was three and had it all through, they closed it when I was in college. And basically, you know, if I wanted to see my parents, I had to go to the restaurant and at least like attend staff dinner or go shopping in the walk in refrigerator or work there. We lived above it for a while so I could [00:37:00] see them then too.
But it's a really fascinating story about like New York City in the 1980s when, you know, all good food at that point was considered to be French food, right? You had to go train in a French kitchen. You had to name your restaurant, you know? Chez Panisse or Lutece, you know, like a Basque. Some people are actually French, some people are not. And my parents were kind of like the upstarts that never went to culinary school, never trained in France, and basically decided to kind of pioneer a new form of American cuisine and integrate like influences from Japan and France and, you know, other parts of the world and do things like farm to table before there was ever a name for it and fusion cuisine before there was a name for it. And that for a long time it was the most expensive restaurant in America. So it's a very like luxurious experience and you know, I would be home upstairs and my mom would call up and be like, Hey, Mick Jagger's here for dinner. Do you want to come meet him? So I just come downstairs and have him like sign in a record album that we had around, [00:38:00] which I still have.
And yeah, so fascinating experiences growing up. And so I'm going to tell the story essentially both of like my childhood growing up there as well as like, the restaurant's biography and all the like Innovations they made in the world of restaurants and food and how that's influenced, you know, the big restauranteurs today in the world we live in you know with people celebrating kind of food culture and everything from chef's table to the bear like it kind of ties into that, you know popularity of food and restaurants and as well as like innovation and entrepreneurship.
So
David Elikwu: Oh, amazing. That sounds, I mean, I did some reading about the restaurant in preparing for our conversation, but I would love to read that. That sounds so exciting. So it's so interesting. And it was a really interesting story for, from, from what I've seen anyway.
Thatcher Wine: to get back to work it.
David Elikwu: Okay. Last question.
Book Recommendations and Conclusion
David Elikwu: This can either be, you, you can take this where you want either. What is the book that you've gifted the most? Or is there any [00:39:00] particular book that you would recommend maybe two books to listeners? I think particularly because you, just as you were talking about, you know, your formative years growing up around The Quilted Giraffe you've got kids that are, around college age now.
I'm not sure if you've gifted them books in the past or you've given them any tips on how to cultivate their own libraries. But I'd love to know, yeah, from someone that spent so much time around books, helping to put together collections of books for people, assumingly having gifted books to people in the past, are there one or two books that you, that come to mind when you think about, Oh, these are books that I would always try and give to someone.
Thatcher Wine: that's a really tough question to ask somebody who like does this for a living. And always like personalizes around the, you know, who the recipient is. But I will say you know, I think for understanding the world we live in right now, like, anything by Kurt Vonnegut, like a Kurt Vonnegut anthology is really helpful to kind of understand like, I mean, great storytelling, great characters, and also just like understanding kind of the [00:40:00] corporate, you know, culture and like, you know, what businesses versus individuality and politics and just like, understanding where we're at in terms of politics and stuff right now in an entertaining story format.
Slaughterhouse Five is his most famous book. Cat's Cradle is a great book. Breakfast of Champions is another one. So, I'm cheating by giving you more than, you know, two books. And then in the food world, I mean, I think I've re read Kitchen Confidential recently. Anthony Bourdain, brilliant writer.
And I think just for like somebody who reinvented a genre. Like, nobody knew that you could make food writing exciting. Some people argue with me about that, but you know, for him to come along in like the late 90s, early 2000s when he did that, it was just like a revolution in a genre.
And I really love writers and thinkers and creatives who just like reinvent something that people didn't know needed to be reinvented, right? I've kind of done that with books. My dad did that with [00:41:00] food. You know, and so I really have a lot of respect for somebody like Anthony Bourdain and being able to do that as a writer.
David Elikwu: Okay. Amazing. Both of those, well, Kitchen Confidential and also Cats Cradle are books I haven't read, so they're on my list and I do need to get around to reading them. So thank you so much for making the time. Honestly, it's been a really engaging and exciting conversation for me.
Thatcher Wine: Yeah. Thank you, David. This is a real pleasure for me as well. So, thank you for all the time and the great conversation.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time
Member discussion