Book smart or Street smart - Who would be your choice?
Taking the right step at the right time is smartness. Being aware of the situations and giving it the right turn is smartness. Whatever life offers you, being able to take that bravely and make it turn in your favour is what makes people stand out of the crowd. It could come to you if you are too wise and leaned or you have experienced enough to be able to differentiate.
If you are well learnt and know your options in and out, you are book smart. You know what has been told to you by the makers of opinion. You followed them close and chose one to be your mentor. They showed you the way and you made it your destination. It does work. Most of these mentors are experts and they do teach you the right things that you could implement in life and be the book smart you could be.
Street smart, on the other hand, is someone who descended to the lower grounds where the incidents take place, saw what happens out there in the real world and then formed his opinion. He too knows the situation in and out but the difference is that he experienced it practically instead of reading from sources. When it comes to choosing between book smart and street smart, it is a tough call indeed.
Street smart:1. Trusting your own judgements: When you have witnessed the harsh realities of life by being amid the harshness and experiencing the real plight, it indeed makes you capable of trusting your own judgements rather than believing blindly in what has been painted by the story makers. When you learn to trust your own judgement, you grow up to be a more skillful and confident person. You are capable of refraining from fickleness and stick to your instincts. That indeed is a quality worth investing in.
2. Learning from real life instances: Street smarts do not rely on books to teach them how situations are handled. They make their surrounding the book that has plethora of knowledge of share only if one is willing to be open and thoughtful. They are strongly opinionated and have more practical knowledge of how to act in a given situation. They are independent and do not always look for help and guidance from others. They have their own way mostly.
3. More sensible: We see child beggary and child labour around us every day on your way to work. We have been told that the government is responsible for not doing enough for these children. We believed it and in our next discussion on the matter, we would simply talk about what provisions the government authorities must make to change the conditions. We are book smart. A Street smart, like many NGOs, stops when they see these children and find out where things go wrong for them. Providing them with their own time, effort and money, they look forward to bringing light into darkness and even if they bring change in the life of one of these children, they are more successful than the book smarts.
4. Closest to reality: Since street smarts thrive on first hand take on a situation, they are more close to reality that any book smart could be. When we read media reports from dangerous grounds, we only know that part of the truth that the media world decided to let us see. Street smarts are those journalists who risk their lives to capture the truth of the situation. They do impart knowledge to us but that will always be a tad different from reality. Street smarts are hence more informed that book smarts.
5. More successful: The greatest minds of every century, as I perceive, have been street smarts and not book smarts. Street smarts go on to make history. If you are book smart, you are likely to get hired by top notch companies who will pay you in luxury but at the apex of that company, perhaps the very owner, the name behind the brand will mostly be a street smart. There are so many examples of how amateurs took over and earned their place amongst the richest or the most influential people in the world.
6. They can think out of the box: So you have a situation at hand. You can rely on a book smart to find the solution for you and he will. Ask 100 different book smarts to solve the same crisis and they will all have the same solution. Ask two different street smarts and you will have plethora of options and out of box solutions at hand.
Book smart:1. More dependable: Street smart are out there to experiment with the world and make decisions that no one else will think of but in their test and trial method, there will be errors and mistakes. Not always are they rectifiable too. Book smarts, on the other hand, have the direct approach to a problem with a solution that has proved its efficacy before and is full proof to be adapted. In the corporate world, these are the kind of approach that is going to matter.
2. Well informed and practical: In practicality, you do need to play safe. You do not always need to do what is not testified yet because you know the risks of taking those initiatives. You know all too well that if things go wrong there will be consequences and you not want to risk losing what could be your only shot at something. Only a well informed person is capable of handling these tasks. Learning has its perks most of which bypasses the experiences of a street smart.
3. They are important people: So we swear by examples of Steve Jobs and Dhirubhai Ambani who barely has a college degree and yet founded some of the biggest companies of all times. But how many more street smarts like them did they hire to run the company? The top positions are owned by well learnt people will expertise in their fields. Why did they need experts if they were all about street smartness? Book smarts are the need of the hour.
4. Street smarts turn rebels: Again there are at least a hundred examples of how street smarts have turned rebels to prove their point. They are sometimes so confident in their own ideas that they refuse to listen to others.
Street smarts do win the race against book smarts but it is the combination of two that does the wonder. If you are a street smart with knowledge, it works best. Book smarts and street smarts, both have their advantages in the corporate world and it depends upon what the employer is looking for to determine who gets the upper hand.
The willingness of see from other perspectives is what makes someone adaptable, a quality without which both street smarts and book smarts are incapable of excellence.
