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Let me paraphrase what I understand about book smart and book street.
Book smart is when one acquires knowledge from book. It is acquiring knowledge from someone sharing the knowledge he learned from books, scholars and study, social media, news and many more. It is also a knowledge impacted through four walls of classroom, and formal setting such as classroom, religious gathering, etc.
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Book smart is to be able to deal with challenges of life through experience and knowledge. Book smart also relies on one intuition to make good judgement.
I will use someone who was my father’s friend as a case study as street smart: my never did not attended any formal education while he was on earth; but yet, he was consulted by politicians and kings for ideas on how to make things happen.
He was a man full of knowledge and understanding about politics and issues of life. He was one of the best friends to the king in my hometown. That was the reason the king tried his best to make him one of his own chiefs, but he insisted.
His eldest son asked him the reason he refused to be a chief, he said, “I already have so many responsibilities in the town and the entire state, becoming chief would limit my responsibilities in the state”.
He was street smart walking with elite and educated people in the state. He was very good at dealing with different kinds of situations and people. He always came up with good ideas that would put an end to the challenges.
This was the reason he was appointed by the chairman to help him during his tenure; with his help according to the chairman, when he was speaking in an occasion; he referenced him.
The chairman said, “I knew him very well, and I knew how God endowed him with knowledge and understanding, that was the reason I pleaded him to help me; whenever he gave me ideas, all his ideas were initiated, and followed up.
“When people saw what I was doing in the community, it was the work I was doing that referred me to the states where I was given a ticket to contest for house of representative. I remembered when I was a chairman, he gave me ideas of what to do if I really want house of representative. I initiated the ideas while I was a chairman, and that was what made people to referred me to the governor to contest for house of representative.
Today, I climbed the ladder of greatness through Mr. Jeremiah who did not attend formal education; why my other colleagues hired learned people to advise them. I will not mention names here, but some of my colleagues failed drastically in their political pursued. This is my 8 years as rep, I am very grateful to almighty God and also grateful to Mr. Jeremiah.”
In this context, it is crystal clear that street smarts have common sense, learned from the past, use their initiate to arrive in good judgement. They are not subject experts, they can easily navigate and have verse experiences than book smarts; that is the reason they tend to know little about everything; due to their verse knowledge and understanding, they are very quick in decision making.
They understand that taking risks is the best thing for them to gather experience. Hence, they are risk takers.
Street smarts easily figure out the best environment that suits them, they easily adapted to an environment when it comes to any area of life such as business, office work, apprentice and many more.
Street smarts are more general in skills than book smarts; they have little ideas about everything. Example is my senior colleagues in the office, whenever my principal wants to do any work in the school like building, painting, repairing and maintenance of equipment he calls my senior colleagues because he had knowledge about all those things. He is a painter, contractor and engineer.
He also collected contracts from other people, they know him as an engineer, contractor and painter outside but we know him as a teacher. He is very emotionally intelligent.
Book smarts are theoretical and specialists. They are specialized in a particular field and this made them to be master of their field. They find ways to avoid or minimize risk; they don’t like to take risk. Therefore, they get scared of taking risks.
In conclusion, to draw the conclusion between book smarts and street smarts; I prefer book smarts because knowledge is required in this dispensation; and the best way to acquire knowledge is through books. Knowledge from books might be in the form of videos, audio, published books, magazines, news, social media, storytelling, etc.
It is not always good to rely on your knowledge because once you don’t have a solution to those challenges, such a person will be demoralized. No matter how smart you are, there are people that are better than you in that area; it is important to seek more knowledge from those that have more knowledge, understanding and experienced than you so that you can grow.
No one is an island of knowledge: which simply means you need other people's knowledge in your life to grow faster; you need to learn from people that have such knowledge than you.
Book smart is very good because they have core and specialized knowledge about a particular field. When it comes to their field, they can give you 70% of the answers, they are masters of their subject matter.
We all know that book is a collection of experiences. It is also a knowledge transfer from generation to generation. Therefore, you learn 100,000 years of experiences from books.
I have learned a lot from other experiences through books, and learned how to do things right to avoid the mistakes they made.
The experiences I am sharing in the classroom with my students (lesson of the day) are acquired through books, I learned mathematics through different authors, and disseminate it to my students. It is not my own experiences; it is the experiences of others.
Therefore, you can learn street smart from book smart, but you can’t learn book smart from street smart. This is because some of the street-smart ideas are documented in books to read; while a street smart depends only on their own experiences and never considers books as the ultimate knowledge.
I stand up for success, and success is not achieved by merely making mouth, No room for laziness, no room for idleness. Success comes to the people who are desperately and consciously searching for it. When it seems unsuccessful or you smell failure around you, never discourage yourself to be successful.
“Discouragement and failure are the two surest stepping stones to success.” - Dale
Thank you for reading my post