Epics were not written down until quite recently. There is some medieval Mongolian literature (e.g. the secret history), but it's fairly limited. Most study of mongolians using historical literature is done from Chinese and other sources. Same issue with Turkic sources. Even Timur is known from only a few contemporaneous sources, with most of the extant historical sources being written after his death.

You also shouldn't take stories as necessarily accurate portrayals of daily life. Killing dragons and other monsters wasn't a viable route to power due to their rarity, but it's a popular legitimizing myth that shows up all over the place in early medieval European literature. Similarly, while early modern Spain did have "explorers" charting strange new lands and ahem, "romancing" women like their early modern literature (often inspired by that same literature), it was not a typical career for most Spaniards.

Raiding happened, but it was not the sole or even necessarily a primary means of economic subsistence depending on where and when.