Ankur Warikoo: The Workplace Guru

IT’S NOT UNCOMMON to see books getting new covers after they are adapted into movies. If said movies win awards, you can slap the “Oscar winner” sticker on top of the new cover. Similarly, reissues of classics have stuff like “1 million copies sold” on the front cover sticker. All manner of boasts are accepted and, indeed, encouraged when it comes to catching the reader’s eye in a jam-packed bookstore. Ankur Warikoo’s Do Epic Shit (2021) has “Over 60 million views across social media” on the front cover. It’s not uncommon to see authors leveraging their social media reach, but this sticker tells you something about the book’s target audience/readership.

“When I started writing the book there were certain considerations,” Warikoo says during an online interview. “One was that I was writing to an audience between ages 18 and 30 that usually consumes my content. They don’t read a whole lot of books because they have so many distrac­tions (short form, easily digestible) to choose from. I wanted to write a book for people who don’t read books, a book without a definite beginning, middle or end. This way they would feel less obligated to finish it.”

The 42-year-old Warikoo, a former CEO of firms like Groupon India and nearbuy.com, is one of the bestselling authors in India today. His publisher Chiki Sarkar of Juggernaut reckons that Do Epic Shit sold around 2,00,000 copies and adds that the actual number could be much higher because of how widely the book has been pirated (it is ubiqui­tous at traffic lights and on pavements). Get Epic Shit Done (376 pages; ₹399), the follow-up to his first book, written as 36 questions and answers between a student and teacher, is now disappearing off the shelves.

While ‘literary’ readers and writers might be dismissive of the self-help genre, the popularity of the genre is unquestion­able. A glimpse at the numerous online five-star reviews by readers proves how Warikoo has touched a chord with young readers, with each one claiming that the book has been “life-changing”.

Warikoo’s books are motivational in the broadest sense— they contain personal and professional advice for young people who’re striving to become the best version of themselves. They’re structured as listicles or bullet-point, Insta-friendly lists. Basically, self-help with a generous helping of corporate mantras, and it has catapulted Warikoo to the front row of social media celebrities in India. And now, of course, he’s on every Indian publisher’s acquisition list—they all want him, or they want the next version of him, social media-savvy writers who can reverse engineer his success.

Sample this passage about office politics from Get Epic Shit Done—note the frequent line and para breaks, and also the simple, direct language, all catering to the ‘non-reader’.

“If your manager encourages politics and that is aligned to how your top leader also behaves, you do not have a choice, my friend.

It is not politics any more, it is the way the company operates.

You cannot help it.

You can attempt to fight it, but it will be an intense fight.

You can attempt to withstand it, but it will suck all your energy.

Your only job then is to find yourself another job where the leader is working on setting up a company that wants to create a space where people love to come to work.”

Warikoo is refreshingly open about the limitations of his work and indeed, of self-help books in general. When I tell him that self-help as a genre puts the onus of reform on individuals rather than (frequently rigged) institutions, and that for the prolific (or even mid-cap) reader, self-help books can read like basic advice, Warikoo has a very interesting response. He says that he has deliberately written for an audience that does not like to read for pleasure.

“The book is actually going to be a disaster for somebody who loves books,” Warikoo says. “I can tell that you are clearly in the top percentile of readers — you’ll probably be quite bored. It’s so disconcerting to read this book. It just moves from one thing to another to another. There’s no rhythm, no co­herence, no logic, no connectivity. But I made it so because I was writing for an audience that is addicted to scrolling through endless, disparate Instagram reels. You can open and shut this book whenever you please.”

Writers seldom speak about their own work in this vein. But his words do address contemporary work-life attitudes in a meaningful way. Warikoo is looking at his books the way a product manager does, and he’s adjusting the product accord­ingly. This is a time when 21-year-old graduates are asked to “develop their brand” if they hope to have a career. Journal­ists, writers and artists are told that without a social media presence, their careers are doomed. Warikoo’s strategy and his success, then, are very much by-products of this ‘brave new world’ where every individual is in fact a ‘corporation of one’, encouraged to think and act in those terms. He is quite comfortable with thinking of his own writing that way.

Warikoo is similarly comfortable with his own privileges. Don’t self-help books tend to work best for people who already have a bit of a head start in life, I ask. He then describes his own privileges at length.

“This is a very simple assessment—I’m born a Hindu, I’m born a male, I’m born into a Brahmin family,” says Warikoo. “I’m born fair-skinned, I’m born to parents who were educated and sent me and my sister to an English-medium school. I had absolutely nothing to do with any of these things, but they do make me a part of the top percentile of privilege. So, I can go on and on about how much hard work I put in but it will be meaningless because all these invisible factors have helped me reach where I am.”

Inspired by a New York University professor who had done something similar, Warikoo wrote a blogpost in 2017 about the “resume of my mis­takes”. According to the author it was his way of reaching out to people in their 20s who often feel alone and uniquely incompetent, on account of personal and professional failures that are all but inevitable at that age. The blog went viral and even­tually, Warikoo included the core of the “resume of my mistakes” blogpost in the book Do Epic Shit.

“I am so lucky that I became a content creator and writer and teacher after having built busi­nesses for 12 years,” Warikoo says. “Because that experience taught me so much about building a product, consumer behavior, psychographics, be­havioural economics and so on. I apply all of those things to everything I do, whether it’s writing or creating content for social media.”

Publishers certainly love writers who know their way around Twitter and Instagram, and who have strategies for sales and marketing. Warikoo is currently riding the social media wave like few others have done in Indian publishing. Sarkar once said that young people listen to Warikoo because he looks and dresses like a young person (clean-shaven, well-groomed, casual t-shirt and jeans) while offering advice that’s decidedly avuncular.

Her statement rightly captures the ongoing cultural mo­ment. The young feel resentful of their parents and their bosses for handing them an inferior deal, economically speaking (wages have not kept up with inflation). But simultaneously, they also want these older folks’ ‘expert advice’ on how to get to the other side of the fence. This is where Warikoo comes in, and judging by his epic success, he’s here to stay.

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