Recently, I was invited to present at a breakfast meeting. In fact, five of us stood up and spoke, but it’s the taxi driver wisdom I got from my cabbie that morning that’s stuck with me.

Eduardo is in his late sixties and has been driving cabs for over twenty years. At 5.30am, I found him scarily fresh, energetic and upbeat.

Frankly at that time of the day I am not the best company, but as my espresso worked its magic I started to quiz Eduardo on the way he approaches work.

Here’s the taxi driver wisdom I learned:

1. He avoids stress by starting slowly

Eduardo hits the road early and is always out and about by 4am. He doesn’t do this because there are masses of punters around, he does it because it helps him acclimatise to the growing traffic.

As he described to me, traffic build ups trouble you less when it’s gradually happening around you. It’s when you drop straight into a snarl up that you suffer.

I see a parallel with my email inbox. It’s the difference between doing what’s important to me at my pace, before I dive into the jam of other people’s priorities.

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2. He doesn’t focus on earnings

Most cabbies I have spoken with (and I’m an annoyingly talkative passenger) bang on a lot about how the day is going in terms of how many fares they’ve had.

Not Eduardo. He measures the success of a day by how many interesting people he meets. And guess what? He finds everyone interesting.

Well you would wouldn’t you? If you took it upon yourself to seek out what makes everyone tick, how could you not find that interesting?

Eduardo literally makes it his business to develop relationships. And from what he told me he does substantially better than most of his counterparts when it comes to earnings. So much so, they think he has some special guardian angel.

So, do you have some taxi driver wisdom of your own to share? Post a comment below and let’s hear it.