How to Do Epic Shit?
Sharing my top learnings from Ankur Warikoo's event.
Dear Friends!
I hope you have not given up on your resolutions yet and that you are still hitting the gym!
I was part of a discussion named 'How to Do Epic Shit' with Ankur Warikoo and Anirudh Singla on Friday and the conversation was so interesting I was awed more than once. So I thought I must share those golden words of wisdom with everyone!
Ankur Warikoo as might already be familiar with is a 40-year-old multipotentialite. He is an entrepreneur, mentor, public speaker, and angel investor. Ankur is the Co-Founder of Nearbuy.com and was the CEO of Groupon India in the past.
The conversation was mainly around his career trajectory and how he navigates through the content economy.
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1. You are an entrepreneur, investor, content creator, and mentor. Which one do you enjoy most and how do you prioritise different projects?
He approaches the journey or the process, by picking up problems that excite him or have a large impact, or can be immensely challenging and something that he can do for a long period. To him, entrepreneurship is about mindset. And if he had to choose amongst all the roles he would love to be an entrepreneur any day of the week.
He says that the people in the past, especially the ones who changed the course of history, never confined themselves to one field or one job. He elaborated how Leonardo Da Vinci was a sculptor, philosopher, painter, polymath, innovator amongst other things. The industrial revolution changed this by division and specialisation of labor.
He hopes to be remembered as someone who played many roles throughout his life.
2. How do you manage time?
Ankur says that he has been obsessed with time since his childhood days so much so that he carried a notebook where he recorded everything that he did throughout his day and later an excel sheet.
And while tracking and obsessing over time he realised that time management isn't about managing time, it is about managing energy. He believes that whenever we say that we don't have time we are actually saying that we don't have the energy to do something. And that then equates to priority and how much of ourselves we want to invest in something.
This can be changed by doing things on a daily basis in a disciplined manner. He says that we must do all those things that give us energy right at the start of the day but instead, we generally start our day by staring at a screen which automatically disturbs our emotions and concentration.
He advises us to be self-aware of what are the things that draw out our energy. If we approach every day having full control over our energy and emotions then we won't be facing any problem in managing time. He quoted Naval Ravikant, "When you get to a point that you do things that are so easy to you, but people have no idea how you do them, that is it. That is bliss."
3. What was the primary motivation that brought you to this platform?
Nearbuy started in 2015 and he realised that if they wanted to recruit the best talent in the country then they have to do something unique. He decided to take charge and reach out to the consumers. The objective was to reach the best talent. They wanted to carve an identity as an employer.
He says before the journey started on LinkedIn it started much earlier on Quora because that's where all the top engineers were hanging out at that time. He started posting content on Quora related to Nearbuy. They were very transparent, they even posted their entire salary structure online, which went viral. Then after some time, they migrated to LinkedIn. He also recalls an incident that LinkedIn launched their video feature in 2016 and he waited for it to go online but it did not happen. Then suddenly one day out of frustration he posted a question about the feature and tagged the CEO of LinkedIn and the feature was live within an hour. That happened to be a Wednesday and so he named his video series Warikoo Wednesdays. And his first video was titled, “If you don't ask, the answer is always NO." And that started the entire journey and took a shape of its own.
4. What came naturally to you that made you create content?
The entire journey of starting up, because it was not as glamorous as people thought it would be.
People are very important to him in the entire system of things. He realised as employers at Nearbuy that people we're approaching the entire journey of a professional career in the wrong manner, purely out of ignorance. People were not able to navigate the world that was laid out before them. They did not understand the importance of things like feedback, reading, teamwork, work-life balance, etc.
So a lot of the content was directed towards these problems.
5. How to engineer a team as an individual creator?
The key for Ankur is not really the team. The key is to generate ideas in order to create organic content.
According to him, phones today are brilliant. We should invest in a good tripod and ring light maybe. We can learn editing ourselves and that will prove out to be very beneficial for us. There is enough and more free software, stock images, license-free music available so there is no worry about that. And then we must keep posting in a disciplined fashion by focusing on one platform and winning that platform as well. He also advises to approach that with at least 2 years of commitment otherwise it won't work. You cannot sign up with luck as a strategy.
6. Do you face creative burnout and how do you deal with it?
No, was his answer since he is 40 and he has seen life and how it works. His biggest realisation is that good things take time and everyone is running a different race.
He says we face creative burnout for 2 main reasons:
We run out of ideas. No one is capable of coming up with organic ideas consistently throughout their career. And hence we depend upon inspiration. But he thinks the content world today is so pervasive that business can be made out of curation.
We run out of energy because we are constantly comparing ourselves. And in the long term comparison is the worst friend. He says to rely on people who have done the work we hope to do.
7. What are the accounts he follows for inspiration?
Gary Genard Chuck, Kunal Shah, and Abdal Ali would be his top 3 picks amongst many others.
8. What creators should not do?
Don't create time-specific content.
Since it loses its currency over time, it's better to create content that will stay relevant for a long period, say 5-10 years. If the content is too time-sensitive it becomes news, which should not be the case.
Don't create content that is tied to your current state of life.
He elaborates using the example of a beauty blogger, that if a blogger only talks about his skin type and his fashion sense, and his health routines audiences will not be able to relate. That blogger needs to talk about everything that's happening in the field and not just about themselves to make a mark.
Don't over-index the jazz
He says, not to focus too much on animation graphics, intros, outros, etc i.e., the stuff that makes the content more palatable. If we have to focus too much on these to grab the audience's attention then that means the content itself is not worthy enough. It's better to focus on the quality of the content itself.
What a great conversation this was with Ankur Warikoo, the full video will be soon available on Pepper Content’s YouTube channel.
We will be hosting our monthly Bolti Bandh Conversation next Sunday, keep an eye on your emails to know who the guest for this month is and what is the topic!
For any questions please DM me on Instagram @pawan_rochwani
Much needed!