Alumni Advice: Jon Bonné ‘90
By SAM ALTMAN and JINMIN LEE
Welcome to our new weekly column, Alumni Advice, where we interview successful Exeter alumni and ask for career and life advice. Our first successful alumnus is Jon Bonné ‘90, a journalist, food writer, and bestselling author.
As a journalist, Bonné has worked for NBC News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Decanter. As an author, he has published three books, one of which, The New Wine Rules, has over fifty thousand copies sold in over six languages. During his career, he has worked many years as JetBlue Airways’s wine expert and is now the managing editor at Resy, an online service for reserving restaurants valued at over $200 Million today.
Bonné shared his experience getting noticed by successful and selective companies as a journalist. “For my process of getting hired, I didn’t do anything specifically; people came to me. With the San Francisco Chronicle, I didn’t know they were even looking for someone. Getting my job for JetBlue was very similar. Jamie Perry, who created the Mint product, which is the business class product for JetBlue, reached out. He had read one of my books, The New California Wine, and was really interested.”
Bonné gave advice on getting noticed by important people. “In terms of explicit advice, I think you need to be smart and distinctive and offer a paradigm shift viewpoint in whatever it is you do. JetBlue reached out because they were building something completely different, and they didn’t want their airline product to be like the others. He found me, a guy who had a younger voice and thought differently than many of the other wine authors out there.”
After his advice on journalism, Bonné reflected on his general writing process. “I am kind of a non-linear thinker—I have lots of ideas in my head, and so when I’m writing, I sit down and connect all of these dots together. But figuring out the flow of a chapter or an essay is my way of taking a completely non-linear memory and making it linear. One writer who formalized this better is John McPhee, who’s a writer for The New Yorker and has written many books. He had the ability to reference back to things he wrote 200 pages before and have this remarkable wiring underneath. As you get bigger projects with lots and lots of information, you need to have an organizational structure that works and hits the points that you need at the time.”
Adding on, Bonné offered Exeter-specific advice. “I would say it’s worth a moment at some point along the journey, even in senior Spring, to reflect on the extraordinary preparation Exeter gives you for life. It will far surpass almost any college experience anyone has intellectually.”
Bonné had a couple of general life “hacks” for new students. “Finish your shower with 15-30 seconds of cold water because it will wake you up immediately. Even if it’s February in New Hampshire, if you are just desperately in need of waking up after having pulled an all-nighter, it will shock you back into focus. It’s great for your pores and regulating body temperature.”
“More seriously,” Bonné continued, “I think it is very easy to worry too much about performance. Exeter is great in that it is committed to holistic thinking and creating thoughtful graduates who function in many different ways. That alone separates Exonians from most of our peers. I can’t imagine the pressure that you folks are under now. Overall, I think the pressure can be unhealthy and doesn’t necessarily nurture the ability to wander a bit intellectually and find things that are intriguing.”
Bonné concluded with an exhortation to persevere: “I do wish someone had told me while I was going through all of this, that even though it seems overwhelming now, the bar is set so high at Exeter that you will probably never be afraid of any other intellectual task in your life. You will be challenged, but you’ll be prepared to be fearless in your thinking.”
