Some Musings from my Wanderings: Part-1

The last few months took me to various parts of the world, and gave me a chance to interact with a lot of cab and rickshaw drivers. From a homegrown collective of auto-rickshaws in Coimbatore to G7 Taxi in Paris, through the spectrum of Ola-Uber-FastTrack-RedTaxi-Careem, and the individual operators, my conversations yielded a lot of learning.

They can be broadly classified into 3 categories:

a) Driving solely on one/more ride hailing apps

b) Do not drive for any ride hailing apps and only take offline bookings

c) Drive for one/more ride hailing apps, and take offline bookings as well

Category (a) turned out to be predominantly those who took up the profession after they saw that cab drivers made good money with zero business development efforts. They also turn out to be the ones who told me stories of unpaid EMI payments and abandoning cars in highways, as the dwindling payouts and changing rules for incentives on the ride hailing apps meant a very unsteady and diminished income. There was one guy in Dubai who narrated his story of how he had multiple cars operating on Uber and Ola in Mumbai, and completely lost out on the business last year, and estimated that he would have to drive cab in Dubai for 20 years to pay-off his current debts.

In contrast, I found most people in (b) and (c) to be in a better and stable financial position. One of them, who has been in business for 18-20 years and never been a part of any ride hailing app, kept getting calls from a famous ride-hailing app, imploring him to join them and how they were willing to pay him more than their standard rates! He and many others (including some relatively young newbies to the business) have chosen to solely depend on their own skills and professional/personal network to sustain in the market, and it is working out for them.

These experiences reinforce something I've always believed in; understanding the difference between skills and tools. While tools make our jobs easier, solely depending on them without understanding the core skills necessary would make one very hard to remain relevant for long. When a tool changes (or becomes obsolete), or as the market evolves, it would put the person in a very unsustainable and precarious position. Only a strong fundamental grasp over the core skills necessary for any career/business would enable someone to achieve stability and continued success. Times of accelerated advancement await us in the coming years, and it is important that we invest enough time and effort in identifying and practicing the key skills necessary to sustain in the paths we choose. And along with it, we should also learn working with the relevant tools, but be mindful that a tool is only as good as our skill, and always be ready to extrapolate our learning to any new tools. Or achieve so much mastery that you create a new tool!

This is universal and holds good whether you're in the cab business, or considering a career in Data Science/Artificial Intelligence!