4 Hidden Opportunities for Uber and Lyft Drivers

We drive mostly to make money: We drive, we earn, we drive, and we earn. But there’s quite a few things that are really these golden opportunities that we have with all that time that we’re spending in the car. And stick around, because at the end of the video I’m gonna share with you my number one hidden opportunity for rideshare driving.

 

 

Ongoing education

The first hidden opportunity is ongoing education. We spend a lot of time in the car, and with the invention of podcasts, it’s amazing how much new stuff we can learn. Whether you want to learn about elk hunting, you want to learn about how your mind works, about meditation, you want to learn about MMA fighting, you want to learn about peak performance, you want to learn about the paleo diet.

Here (in the video) I’m showing you some of my favorite podcasts that I listen to. If you do 20 rides a day, and in between the rides you have 5 minutes, that’s like 100 extra minutes that you have where you can be listening to podcasts when your passengers aren’t in the car.

Develop a sense of self discipline

The second hidden opportunity is to develop a strong sense of self discipline. We’re very unusual, we’re independent contractors, we don’t have a boss. We need to strengthen our self discipline, our ability to work and get something down the road. In other words, delayed gratification. It’s something that most people don’t have to deal with on a day to day basis because they have their regular job, and they’ve got a boss that tells them they’ve got to be at work. What I do is I create a daily schedule, and my job is to stick to that schedule and get all my stuff done.

Learn the art of conversation

Hidden opportunity number three is the art of conversation. Since I’ve been driving I’ve done close to 21,000 rides, that means 21,000 people have come into my car. I don’t know what level of how long you’ve been driving, but say it’s 1000, say it’s a few hundred. Everyone of those is an opportunity for you and me to become better conversationalists. To ask a few simple questions and listen for the response, and then continue the conversation.

You can experiment with things that you say and see how it affects the person that you’re talking to. You’ll learn how important compliments are. Saying nice pleasant things to people, how it changes their whole outlook. Or you can try, if you want, say some negative things, or some controversial things, and notice how you’re not going to get the same kind of positive response.

This is an image from one of my favorite movies called Glengarry, Glenross, which is about a bunch of sales people. And in the movie there’s a point where Al Pacino’s sales manager, who is played by Kevin Spacey, says something with a customer, and he loses the sale. The Al Pacino character says something, which we can learn in our car: “Don’t open your mouth ’til you hear the shot,” which means, don’t give any information away that might be controversial or gets you in trouble, wait for somebody to say something and then just respond to what they said.

And you can see immediately how your conversation also affects how many tips you get. That’s really what it comes down to. You can tell how you’re doing with your customers by the kind of tips that you’re getting.

Learn the art of listening

And the fourth, and most important, I believe, is that you get to learn the art of listening. There’s an old zen statement that says, “We have two ears and one mouth.” So we listen twice as much as we talk. And what I have found is that when I can really listen to my passengers, and let them share, let them express themselves, that that’s really what people want to do. They want to be able to express themselves and to be gotten. They want to be gotten. They want to be heard by somebody.

This is a skill, that if you learn it, it works so well with your partner, it works with your children, it works wherever you interact with people. The hidden, the pretty much neglected. Everyone’s talking at each other, talking back and forth, you can learn to be a really great listener because of the amount of time you’re in your car interacting with so many different people.

My favorite podcast

Now, I told you I’d share with you my favorite thing. My favorite thing to share with you comes from the first thing I said, which was listening to a lot of podcasts. I love to listen to the Joe Rogan podcast. This is a recent thing for me, because I didn’t used to listen to him at all. But he does these very long, three hour long, conversations with people. And he talks about hunting, MMA, he has intellectuals on, and he’s almost like a blue collar guy in the way he talks to people. And he just asks logical questions, and he has real interesting conversations. So check out the Joe Rogan Experience as a podcast.

Thanks for watching. This is Jay Cradeur with the Rideshare Guy. If you haven’t subscribed to the YouTube channel here, sign up. If you’re a driver, you need to be on top of all the most current information and this YouTube channel will give it to you. Thanks for watching. You all go out and have a great day.