Learning it before you must

Ten years ago, a tuk-tuk driver in Kafr el-Sheikh who could take a payment by phone, find a back lane on a map and keep his regular passengers saved in his contacts would have seemed almost exotic.

Today some of the drivers at the rank do at least one of those things, and in a few years nearly all of them will do all three. That part is not in doubt. Tools get easier, passengers expect more, and the holdouts are pulled along in the end.

The only real choice a driver has is timing.

He can wait until the day a passenger has no cash and walks to the next tuk-tuk, then learn in a hurry, badly, out of embarrassment. Or he can learn now, while it is still a little awkward and nobody demands it, and spend the next few years being the driver people call first.

Learning early costs something. A nephew has to show him twice. A transfer goes to the wrong number once. He feels slow and slightly foolish in front of younger men. That discomfort is the whole price, and most people decline to pay it until they have no choice, by which time the advantage of knowing has been spread thin across everyone.

The same is true of the shopkeeper deciding whether to learn how home delivery works, or the woman running a small clothing business from her flat.

And it is true of skills with no screen at all: how to explain a decision, how to hear a complaint, how to bring other people along. Those improve over the years for everyone too. The question, each time, is whether you go first or get dragged.