Born and raised in Delhi, Ravi Kapoor, who is now known as a mentor to lakhs of UPSC aspirants, was once a 2011-batch IRS officer in Customs & Indirect Taxes. However, he ultimately chose to give up his life built on the foundations of bureaucracy, as he walked away from the Indian Revenue Service after over a decade of service in 2023.
For the unversed, Kapoor’s life has been nothing short of a marvel. Over the years, he’s sported many avatars, including IRS officer, bodybuilder and a mentor to countless students.
Why Ravi Kapoor quit IRS
This past week, Kapoor bared his heart in an unfiltered confession on LinkedIn, in which he revealed what prompted him to ultimately quit the IRS. He admitted that no one, except his wife, stood by his decision to relinquish his post in the IRS. But he figured out that he had made the right decision quite early on.
“After leaving the Indian Revenue Service, I realised something important,” Ravi Kapoor wrote on LinkedIn. “Life did not become worse. It became more fulfilling.”
And once that epiphany hit him, he was left with no choice but to reflect on what he had been all along. “We believe happiness, success, and motivation come from rewards, titles or medals. They don’t. They are not created by self-help books either. They are created in the brain,” he added.
Sharing his personal experience during his time in the IRS, he reveals that things started making sense to him when he completed his Master’s in Clinical Psychology around 2016-17. Diving deep into the science behind it all, Kapoor wrote there are “four chemicals behind everything we chase.” These are dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins.
Debunking how people generally associated dopamine as the “chemical of reward,” he noted that it was actually the opposite. “It is the chemical of the chase. The effort. The struggle,” he wrote, reflecting on how he was experiencing all these aspects while he was bodybuilding and preparing for UPSC himself.
“Bodybuilding gave me the chase, but no social impact,” he went on. “The IRS gave me impact, but no chase.”
Looking at the parallels of those different parts of his life, he realised how people are always “optimising for these chemicals” without even realising it. “Endorphins come when you push beyond pain. And addiction is not the problem. Addiction to the wrong things is.”
“When these four come together, happiness and success stop being different things. This understanding is what eventually led to the Syllabus of Life work.”
Having undertaken several journeys of transition himself, giving his contributions to the worlds of sports, public service and education, Kapoor said that most people when faced with such circumstances end up taking big decisions without clarity, support or understanding of their patterns.
“Had someone explained these things to me earlier, the journey could have been very different,” he reflected on his own life story. “Today, through psychology and psychometrics, the work focuses on helping people make better decisions, understand their own minds, recognise patterns and break them when needed.”
About ex-IRS officer Ravi Kapoor
After passing out of Class 12th in 2004, he ended up pursuing engineering in college, something that didn’t particularly make him happy. As per Indian Masterminds’ profile of the former IRS officer, he ultimately found his way to bodybuilding and powerlifting.
Sports soon became his everything, as he even went on to play for the national Indian rugby team. Unfortunately, things came crashing down when he got involved in an accident and lost out on attending the rugby national camp.
At a time when he couldn’t see straight ahead, his path led him to UPSC CSE in 2008. Despite having been an average student, he cleared the exam in 2009. Nonetheless, he was still on the reserve list without any posting. And so, cleared the exam once again the following year and joined the IRS (Customs & Central Excise). Attempting the IAS exam in 2011, he again passed with flying colours.
While he liked the service, the Covid-19 pandemic redirected him to working on a book essay writing. As the book “The Ultimate Cheatbook of Essay and Answer-Writing” was published in 2021, it became a hit among aspirants, opening up other avenues of opportunity in his life.
When approached by students with doubts, he decided to prepare a guide for UPSC CSE aspirants. “Every year, lakhs of students appear for the UPSC CSE. Each one of them required guidance. So, I tried to make out a full end-to-end mentorship program that can help the students,” he previously told Indian Masterminds.
During the 2020-2023 period, Ravi struggled to balance his job as an IRS officer and decision to mentor aspirants. He finally left the service in 2023.