I didn't start driving for Uber because I wanted to write a book. Still, counting up till January 6, 2023, I've clocked 18,002 Uber trips, starting back in October of 2019. Along the way, I started talking to passengers. Many come in preoccupied with their phones or on a phone call-setting up a date, ordering tickets, calling Mom. If a passenger is free to talk, I ask questions. Where are they going? What do they do for work? How does their job work? If in biotech, what drugs are they working on? If an electrical engineer working on a NASA experiment, what part do they play in getting it into orbit?
I asked lots of questions and started to get questions answered. Patterns emerged about how passengers ran their lives. How they were actively successful in their fields and living successful lives. From the fifty-four interviews I conducted, I studied the turning points in passengers' lives. How did they deal with those anxiety-filled, sometimes dark, sometimes light, sometimes terrifying moments that made them who they are? I learned what passengers hold to be important. I created this book to tell their stories, to tell the arc of their lives, and to learn from them the keys to their success. This book has thirty stories out of the fifty-four interviews I conducted. Maybe there will be a book two! These stories inspire me. I hope they will inspire you too.
I've organized the book around the concepts that my passengers' stories manifest: how to be successful, how to be happy, how to know what you should be when you grow up, how we can save the planet, and how riders extend a helping hand.