Finally I jumped into the taxi after snaking through a long line at NYC’s LaGuardia airport after a night of travel.

Unable to contain myself I told my driver to change his route to my hotel. After all I was sitting in the back seat.

Unphased, he responded, “To excel at my job you have to throw away your GPS system.”

How did he know I was plotting our slow crawl into Manhattan trusting the blue ball on my iPhone’s Map App?

He continued, “You have to know your stuff. You can’t rely on a system that doesn’t take into account what’s really going on. If I followed that device you’d be stuck for over an hour on that bridge. There’s a wreck. We are going the best way right now.”

We got to my hotel pretty timely – and the back seat driver was humbled and thoughtful.

Sometimes our technology provides the answers. But don’t give up knowing your stuff, taking a pulse of your current reality, and making decisions using all of your resources.