The debate between book learning versus experience has been an age old debate.
While there is still no clear ‘right’ answer, there is overwhelming evidence that experience gives us very vital skills that book learning cannot. It is a debate as old as higher education itself: What is your greatest ally when it comes to getting grounded in work, business or life itself?
Do certification and accreditation guarantee a persons skill and competency, or does hands-on experience count for more? And beyond securing a job or becoming established in a chose vocation, will it be experience or further education that serves you better in terms of remaining employed, developing in your career, and making a healthy living for decades to come?
Confucius once wisely said; “By three methods we may learn: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
Here are four very good reasons why experience might be your greatest ally:
1. Experience allows you to understand the theory behind the concepts.
While book learning is important to understand the concepts, those concepts aren’t going to help you unless you understand the application of those concepts in real time. Reading about war is much different than fighting in one.
Experience puts you in the trenches and gives you the opportunity to practice the concepts that you’ve learned. There’s only so much you can learn from a book. Without the application of concepts in real-life experience, vital skills cannot be learned effectively.
2. Experience allows you to become an expert in your field.
Expert musicians, expert athletes, expert scientists, and expert doctors didn’t become experts by reading books. Of course, reading books gave them the knowledge, but their experience provided the know-how. Their expertise came because they practiced their craft over and over and over again and again.
Experts aren’t created through book learning. Experts are self-made because they have put in the work and the practice and the hours to achieve that status. It is their experience that sets them apart from everyone else. If you want to be an expert in your field, practice and experience are essential. No amount of book learning can compensate for it.
3. Experience is ingrained in your memory.
Practice makes permanent. And the more you practice, the more you’re able to create new pathways in your brain to help you continually do the work better. The more experience you have practicing the concepts you learn, the more proficient you will be at the skills that are required to master those concepts.
With experience, the skills and concepts will become second nature to you. They will be embedded into who you are and eventually, they will become a part of you. When the concepts are engrained in your memory, instead of requiring book knowledge, you’ll have the experience to actually write a book yourself.
4. Experience allows you to learn from your mistakes.
Our greatest growth in any industry will come when we have the courage to try and we stop fearing our own mistakes. The more we practice the skills that we’ve learned, the more we fine-tune those skills until we’ve mastered them. There is value in trying things, and in making mistakes.
As Edison said about the lightbulb: “I didn’t fail. I just found 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb; I only needed to find one way to make it work.” Every iteration Edison did, he fine-tuned his ability to create the one way that was successful. Those 2,000 “mistakes” led Edison to make one of the greatest discoveries of his time.
Experience allows us to fail, but it also allows us to learn from those mistakes and use those failures to succeed. That is priceless knowledge, and something that is not found in any book.
Christine x