Seriously need to get this off my chest because I am going crazy listening to this guy. Every time we meet at the kopitiam, it’s the exact same grand speech. “Bro, I’m going to build my own business. I want to scale, be my own boss, buy a landed property or at least a big condo in five years. Have to hustle hard now.”
Sounds great, right? Very ambitious. But then you look at what he actually does with his time. Every single weekend, every public holiday, every night after his main stuff is done, what does he do? He takes his car and goes out to drive Grab.
When I ask him why he’s driving Grab if his main goal is to build a business, his logic is always, “Bro, using my free time to hustle mah. Extra side income to fund the dream.”
I just cannot wrap my head around this mindset. It is the most backwards logic ever. Driving Grab is literal linear income. You put in one hour, you get maybe 20 to 30 bucks if you are lucky and hit the surge pricing. The moment you stop driving, the money stops. Where is the scaling? Where is the business value? You are literally just a highly-stressed employee for an algorithm, burning your own petrol and eating the crazy vehicle depreciation (don’t even get me started on COE prices right now) just to see a few extra digits in the bank account at the end of the day.
Meanwhile, his so-called “business” is completely stagnant. Because by the time he finishes a 6-hour driving shift in the crazy Singapore traffic, dealing with difficult passengers and getting cut off by other drivers, his brain is completely fried. He goes home and slumps on the sofa. He has zero mental capacity left to actually do the hard work: strategizing, networking, building a product, doing marketing, or even just learning a new high-income skill.
Building a business requires deep work and compounding effort. You build a system or an asset once, and it pays you repeatedly over time. Driving Grab is the exact opposite of that! You are trading your most valuable asset—your time and cognitive energy—for immediate, non-scalable cash. It is the ultimate illusion of productivity. You feel tired, so you feel like you are working hard towards your dream, but you are actually running in the opposite direction.
I try to tell him, “Bro, if you take those 20 hours a week you spend driving Grab, and put it into building your business, it will compound. Yes, first 6 months you might earn zero. But by year 2 or year 3, that business could be worth hundreds of thousands.” But he just cannot see past the instant gratification of cashing out his Grab wallet at the end of the night.
It just pains me to see someone talk so big about escaping the rat race, only to voluntarily lock himself inside a car to run on an even faster, more exhausting hamster wheel. You want to buy a big house in Singapore by driving Grab on the side? Good luck waiting until you are 80 years old, bro. Stop kidding yourself and actually build the business. End rant.