Nobody knows the whole city any more

A generation ago, a good taxi driver in Riyadh carried the city in his head. Name a mosque, a bakery, a side street in Al Malaz, and he would get you there without asking twice.

Nobody can do that now. The city adds roads, districts and whole neighbourhoods faster than any one person could learn them. The best drivers have not got worse. The city simply outgrew the idea that one head could hold it.

The same thing has happened to almost every field I can think of. There was a point when a keen person could know their category end to end: every competitor, every pack on the shelf, every trick that had been tried. That point has passed. There are more sellers, more channels and more ideas published every morning than anyone could read in a year. Even the people who write the reference books are behind.

I find this a relief rather than a worry, because it changes what being good means.

Being good no longer means knowing. It means staying in the path of interesting things: the odd question from a customer, the stall that is doing something you cannot explain, the conversation slightly outside your field. It means noticing when you have been surprised, and treating the surprise as a clue rather than an embarrassment.

And then it means having a decent instinct for where the answer probably lives. Not the answer itself. The direction.

The driver who still does well in Riyadh today is not the one who memorised the most streets. It is the one who spots the new junction, asks the right person at the petrol station, and has a hunch which way to turn before the map has caught up.