Are books more important than experience?
Books contain lots of knowledge which is vital but then again its all theoretical and is
made from peoples ideas and personal experience which for them may be successful
but for others not. It’s great to have lots of knowledge but you have to put it into
practice in a real working environment. A person can read a book on how to play
football and know every aspect about the game but when on the field it doesn’t
necessarily mean he is going to be David Beckham.
Books concentrate on a certain topic with great detail and are a great form of
knowledge. Learning from books gives us a great insight about the world and things’
accruing as the world develops not just through advanced technology, cultural
changes and how concepts work. But you need to put this into practice to derive all
the benefits. To me it’s a waste of time reading how to do something if your not
actually going to do it, that’s why putting theory into practice is important.
Learning through books differs in many ways than learning through experience. I’m
going to use the same example as the boy who reads a book how to play football but
necessarily won’t turn out to be David Beckam: even if the boy goes through every
book on the game and researches all the skills needed to be the ultimate player this
cannot be guaranteed he is going to play football professionally. This is primarily
Because the books can only tell you the way to strike a ball, tackle an opponent and
take the perfect free kick to curl it around the goalkeeper. To be a good football player
you need to train the necessary muscles and be extremely fit and practicing kicking
the ball to insure exact accuracy and to pass the ball past an opponent can only be
done by practice where as books only provide you with the basics on how to perform
these manoeuvres and on the other hand ‘practice makes perfect’
Learning through experience makes the situation real and reality is how it happens not
how it’s written in books. Everyone prefers to be doing something practical rather
than reading books therefore not just my opinion but statistics prove that if someone
enjoys doing something they will derive more knowledge from it, as they are actually
interested in what they are doing. Also you don’t make mistakes when reading a book
so how can you learn from them but whilst doing practical for sure you will make
some mistakes and therefore you can learn from them.
Reading books is about remembering and experience is about understanding ‘with
remembering comes forgetting and with understanding comes knowledge’