DO EPIC SHIT by Ankur Warikoo
Ankur Warikoo is a well-known entrepreneur, mentor, influencer, and big brother for many people on social media. He is famously known for his candid talks on his life, failures, upbringing, thoughts on money, and more.
I’ve been following him for more than one year now, and every Friday morning, I read his weekly newsletter along with Finshots. There are times when I shared his blogs with my friends, and we discussed his newsletters.
Nothing matters more in life than showing up every day. To work, to assume responsibilities, to nurture relationships.
One of the reasons he is a household name in the millennials is how he narrates a story about failures and the lessons he learned from them. I brag about our successes but take a back seat when analysing our failures.
Whenever I deal with a setback, I tend to deliberately forget that and focus on the future with much optimism, but what happens if we don’t learn anything from our failures? Ankur gained immense respect here for being candid about failures and putting them out in the hope that the younger generation could avoid the same failures.
Recently, he compiled all his thoughts on life, with his experiences in a book and published “Do Epic Shit,” and as someone who didn’t read a book for the past four months, it enticed me to read and finish as I had the context of this book & person.
I started this in the second week of January and finished it in ten days, making it the fastest English book I have finished in my life (I am not a fast reader in English yet). Coming to the book, I had mixed thoughts while reading the book even though I highly appreciate Ankur for being open about the purpose he wrote this book as he quotes “to play book-cricket with this book.”
This book is divided into a couple of chapters like Success and Failure, Relationships, Money, and Habits. It is, in a way, properly structured on a broader level, with the thoughts pertaining to each chapter are provided in those chapters.
As he mentioned in the introduction of the book, this book is a compilation of thoughts Ankur has posted on social media & blogs for the past one year or so. If you’re a regular follower of him on social media, I would say it has nothing new to offer except that all of that is at one place.
In the final chapter, Ankur compiled a series of letters intended for his children, Vidur and Uzma, and I was reading those with a smile on my face as those felt like the conversations we could have had with our elders or kids.
I felt he didn’t treat this as a comprehensive book which makes it not talk about anything in a more profound sense, and he touched most of the thoughts on a surface level without much depth.
There are times when I felt there was a sudden context switch that kind of annoyed me as I was getting immersed into something, and he turned the direction instantaneously.
The editing could have been better with respect to placing the content and not going places in the very next paragraph. As I mentioned earlier, this feels like reading a compilation of bookmarked blogs but not reading a book, which helps anyone to start on any page and not read this as a typical book.
I came across this post on Twitter and concluded that this book had found the right audience that solved the purpose! The book is easy and quick to read due to the simple language and the story we all can relate to or understand.
As the trend of self-help books becoming bestsellers is booming, this book has a great potential to be one, and I think it has already become one. I hope that the book will be edited better in the upcoming versions to be more enjoyable.
Notes from the book:
A year from now, you will wish you had started today. Start today.
The biggest misconception people have is that they are the odd one out and everyone else is sorted! You are what you do. Not what you say you’ll do.
The first few episodes of the Netflix series maybe boring. However, you still keep watching the series. It turns out, a friend told you to stay at it because it gets interesting eventually. What if we treat our goals and our journey in the same way?
Time goes away and leaves us with only one of these two things: regret or results.
If you are in a job that you hate, but it pays you well, stay in the job but move out mentally and emotionally. Make it your job to find new opportunities.
To know what you don’t know is power. To ask and learn what you don’t know is a superpower.
Our emotions and feelings are temporary. We think of them as permanent.
Passion is signing up for hard work, because not choosing it would be harder!
Money can buy you stuff. But the biggest thing it buys is freedom. Including freedom from stuff.
‘I wish everyone could get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that’s not the answer.’ — Jim Carrey
An excuse is the distance between who you are and who you wish to be.
Setting targets instead of habits makes us forget the kind of person we want to become. We not only want to run a marathon. We also want to get fit.
Asking is the best thing to do, before making assumptions. It either validates your assumption or you get to understand people better.
Three things that will tell you who/what you consider as important in your life. 1. Your first hour after you wake up; 2. Your last hour before you sleep; 3. Your calendar
The key to having more opportunities in life is to give yourself enough opportunities to get curious.
Habits hire us forever and take us higher, whereas targets tame us and leave us clueless after we achieve them.
We aren’t addicted to things. We are addicted to the emotions that these things generate!
Happiness (and fun) is a language that communicates through your face and your eyes.
Safe is better than sorry. Nope. Risk is better than regret.
Spent years doing something that you do not enjoy any more? Think of the time that lies ahead, not of the time that lies in the past!
If you are scared of losing You have already lost! Loss is a result. Fear is an input.
The easiest way to learn from mistakes is to read books. The next option is to commit them yourself.
Gratitude. Not entitlement. How you treat someone who has nothing to offer defines your value system.
Because I hated money, I never respected it. And I realized that money didn’t respect me either. While I knew how to make it, I never understood how to preserve it. How to grow it.
Market is too high. Let it fall. Market is low. Right time to buy. No one knows the highs or lows of a market. The best way to invest over a long term is to invest regularly. Irrespective of the price at that time.
Only when we shut the door of our ego and be open to learning something new do we realize how much we don’t know!
If we think we are not worthy of love, we will subconsciously deny it. If we truly believe we are worthy of love, we will take the smallest compliments with grace and ease.
Nothing matters more in life than showing up every day. To work, to assume responsibilities, to nurture relationships.
If something is unacceptable to you in others, it must be something that must be unacceptable to you in yourself in the first
The inner world drives the outer. Period.
All excerpts from Ankur, Warikoo. “Do Epic Shit.” Juggernaut Books.
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