What the Heck Do I Do with My Life - My Review & Key Takeaways

I bought this book after reading Ravi Venkatesan’s articles in Times of India as I found these articles to be very practical.

Now after reading this book, I feel good about my decision to pick it up, because here, Ravi has shared all the practical challenges one faces in their professional life and how they can overcome them.

Naturally, I have created notes of my own based on my takeaways from this book, which I am going to implement in my day-to-day life.?

As parting thoughts in this book, Ravi has asked 2 questions and I feel answering them is the best way to write this article.

The questions are –?

1) What are the most useful or intriguing ideas from this book?

2) Which of these would you like to implement?

So, let’s talk about the first one – intriguing ideas. To be honest, there any many but in order to make sure this article doesn’t drone on for pages, I would like to highlight the top 6!

1) S curve – seeing the professional life as S curve. This explains how a new product or technology is adapted and can ultimately be replaced by a new one.?

2) 4-Hour work week – Somehow this idea got stuck in my mind and I would like to learn more about it.?

3) Having 2 bucket list?

a. One for current year – Short term goals

b. One for long term – Life goals

4) Every morning show gratitude towards all the good things we have in our life, instead of being sad about those that we lack or are longing to achieve.

5) Paying forward. I liked how it was highlighted here that we exist because we stand on the shoulders of millions, if not billions, of others. We owe the food we eat to countless farmers, insects that pollinate, plants, trees, and animals. So, how do we repay all this kindness? We pay it forward.

6) Having a mindset of abundance - ‘there is more than enough for everyone’, and not of scarcity - ‘there will never be enough’. Scarcity is more of a Zero-Sum game (you win, I lose) and not a Win-Win one.

Now, onto question 2: which idea I would like to implement?

To me, all the above-mentioned ideas need to be implemented and worked upon because what I found is that these are life skills, and I would like to incorporate all of these. But if I had to choose one then I would like to explore - Paying Forward.

In addition, I would like to learn more about the 4-hour work week and for the same my next read will be “The 4-Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferriss.

Overall, this was a great read, and thanks to Ravi Venkatesan for writing such a practical piece which is very fitting and relevant considering the environment we are living in these days.

In case you have read this book, do feel free to share your reviews in comments section.