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  • February 9th, 2010
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Book smarts vs. Street smarts

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit and vote for. If you dig this idea, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes.

This week’s reader’s choice post: Book Smarts vs. Street Smarts

Polarizing questions are silly since rarely in life do you have to make such exclusive choices. Often if you’re clever, you can find ways to obtain both ends of any X or Y type dilemma. But for fun, I’ll assume you’ve stolen my lunch money and refuse to give it back until I play along and pick one side.

There is no doubt in my mind street smarts kicks book smarts ass. To be street smart means you have situational awareness. You can assess the environment you are in, who is in it, and what the available angles are. Being on the street, or in the trenches, or whatever low to the ground metaphor you prefer, requires you learn to trust your own judgment about people and what matters. This skill, regardless of where you develop it, is of great value everywhere in life regardless of how far from the streets you are.

Most important perhaps, being street smart comes from experience. It means you’ve learned how to take what has happened to you, good or bad, think about it, and learn to improve from it. The prime distinction between street smarts and book smarts is who is at the center of the knowledge. On the street, it’s you. In a book it’s you trying to absorb someone elses take on the world, and however amazing the writer is, you are at best one degree removed from the actual experience. Street smarts means you’ve put yourself at risk and survived. Or thrived. Or have scars. You’ve been tested and have a bank of courage to depend on when you are tested again. Being street smart can lead to book smarts as the street smart sense what works and what doesn’t, and adapt accordingly.

Book smarts, as I’ve framed it, means someone who is good at following the rules. These are people who get straight A’s, sit in the front, and perhaps enjoy crossword puzzles. They like things that have singular right answers. They like to believe the volume, and precision, of their knowledge can somehow compensate for their lack of experience applying it in the real world. Thinking about things has value, but imagining how you will handle a tough situation is a world away from actually being in one (As Tyler Durden says in Fight Club How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?). Like the stereotypical ROTC idiot in war movies (e.g. The Thin Red Line, Aliens 2) who outranks the much more competent and experienced, but less well pedigreed sergeant, the book smart confuse pretense with reality, and only learn of the difference when it is too late. Or worse, even after the fact, they insist on seeking out more books and degrees rather than recognizing they are trying to improve the wrong skills: they are half blind by their own choice since they insist on looking at the world with only one eye.

I say all this as someone who has a deep love for books, and who has some degree of what might be called book smarts. But it’s that knowledge, used in service of street smarts, that best explains whatever I’ve achieved so far in life.

  • Posted Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 9:56 pm

  • in philosophy, reader's choice | 19 Comments » |

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19 Responses

  • Scott Berkun - February 9, 2010 at 10:37 pm #

  • Motely Fool has an article on this – focuses on going to college as the criteria for being book smart which is perhaps narrower than mine. But does have some interested examples from the CEO ranks. The other downside is the focus on the TV show The Apprentice, a show, like many other reality TV shows, that emphasizes the asshole approach to getting ahead.


  • Josh Maher - February 9, 2010 at 10:59 pm #

  • Unfortunately you are contradicting yourself at the end of your statement…

    “it’s that knowledge, used in service of street smarts, that best explains whatever I’ve achieved so far in life”

    In other words, you are who you are because you know how to apply the book smarts you have. So if you don’t have the book smarts, your idolized street smarts would be worth very little and wouldn’t have gotten you where you are today.

    Seems the example you have given us is that book smarts alone won’t get you anywhere and neither will street smarts – it’s the combination of the two and an awareness of the need for both that makes a difference.


  • Scott Berkun - February 10, 2010 at 12:48 am #

  • Josh: It’s hard to contradict yourself when you don’t entirely buy the premise, which I admitted early on :)

    But to defend the position I did choose to take, if I could only have one, it’d be street smarts. I think I have better odds of deriving what I would get from books through other means, than the other way around. I can’t prove this, but I do believe it.


  • josemaria - February 10, 2010 at 9:16 am #

  • I think this is a bit different. I work with many street-smart people and they have some blind zones that they are not aware of. They follow other rules: their own, and they are inflexible about that. If you expose to repetitive patterns you began to believe that this experiences is the reality, and you are less aware of the now famous “black swans”.

    Book-smart people can have less experience, but they have a map of the world. An incorrect map, but one made by thousands of contributions that have been verified. This knowledge have a limit, but it’s much better because you know where you are and what is around you. Of course, this map can be outdated, but you can violate the rules when you think it’s necessary.

    There are genius in both camps, but you need both kinds of knowledge.

    Geeks like to reduce every problem to a few variables, but this doesn’t work. This is the reason why personnel selection process doesn’t always work.


  • Scott Berkun - February 10, 2010 at 9:24 am #

  • Jose: that’s a sound argument. Thanks for making it.

    You’ve made me think there’s something else that’s more important in both cases and that’s the capacity to admit there is more going on that your realize.

    Or put another way, you can read a book or live on the streets and learning nothing in either case. The ability to extract knowledge from experience, or from books, is the important thing.

    It’s also worth noting that which books you read makes a huge difference on what you might learn, just as which streets you choose to hang out on matters.


  • Scott Berkun - February 10, 2010 at 9:26 am #

  • Jose – A better question your post made me think of:

    How do you find your blind spots? And what do you do about it?

    This is perhaps a much better question and prediction of who you’ll become than the book smarts vs. street smarts thing.


  • josemaria - February 10, 2010 at 10:15 am #

  • Well, put yourself in difficult situations. Most people kills for opportunities to learn. I know of people who prefer a job where they will learn to a well paid but boring job.

    I don’t believe in genious, it’s impossible that so many good musician live in the same period of time near Viena. And it’s impossible that so many good programmers/developers/startup-founders live in the SF Bay Area in USA.

    It’s constant growing opportunities and learning from great experiences what make this possible. If you live in a country or work in a company without exciting new problems you will not learn anything, because constant knowledge, being complex or not, will be accumulated by some persons and they will not share it, living in silos, as it’s a source of power.

    This reminds me something I read from a neuroscientist. He said that if you want to experiment a long live (to feel as if every day it’s important and long) you must constantly learn new things because the brain “compiles” routinary things and you feel as if times run too quickly.

    If you have worked in domains out of computing, you will learn that there are many complex domains where knowledge silos are not accesibles. I’m now in the global commerce domain and it’s really incredible how many things you must know to move goods from one port to another. Just to move a container through a custom require from you all your knowledge.

    I’m taking a good course on that, and many people there are street-smarts. They all have good stories about incredible things, and give really good tips and tricks about that world. But then you need the book smarts to know about international agreements, laws and so.

    It’s the same in every domain.


  • Brent - February 10, 2010 at 10:30 am #

  • Good article and points. I also agree with Jose. I feel that you need to know both in order to recognize opportunities or traps. In my corp job, I see high level managers miss huge things because they cannot think outside of their limited training – and I also see street smart players who can’t play the game long enough to win or carve their own path.

    I personally want to know what rainbow sorbet tastes like in order to know I prefer chocolate. Not just read about it.

    Thanks !


  • BenAlabaster - February 10, 2010 at 12:16 pm #

  • Great post, however, one thing you don’t touch on is that street smarts are only really obtained by first hand knowledge – i.e. that which has happened directly to you or what you’ve seen happen to those around you.

    My mother always taught me that life is too short to learn everything from your own mistakes. You need to learn from everyone else’s too.

    Book smarts are the lessons learned from many other people’s fortunes, insights and mistakes – in a shorter amount of time than I could possibly learn them all myself.

    Street smarts allows you to see and understand which of those lessons should be heeded, which can be ignored and those which aren’t really lessons at all, but red herrings, distractions and outright fabrications.

    I would have a hard time choosing one from the other, because without book smarts, I’d have to learn everything for myself first hand which is a long and arduous journey. But without street smarts, especially with the advent of the internet and the masses of complete garbage that comes with it, I’d be learning a lot of false lessons unnecessarily and wasting a lot of valuable time.

    Thus, there is no useful way to separate one from the other when you’re applying them to the real world.


  • Anirban Bhattacharya - February 10, 2010 at 10:22 pm #

  • Well, to start with, I would rather prefer to be a book smart than a streetsmart. Street smart is not a choice; it is something you are exposed upon, forced to live and you survived with all your zeal and courage. A street smart never starts with the will to be a streetsmart. Generally it is his destiny which brings him there.

    But I agree, that to excel a book smart needs to go down to road and try to match his knowledge with all hands-on skill. And the combination of both can take you to the pinnacle.


  • Joel D Canfield - February 11, 2010 at 1:10 pm #

  • “who is at the center of the knowledge”

    That’s super, Scott.

    I agree that, if I had to choose one or the other, I’ll take experience over books (and I say that as a guy who’s written four and has four in the works, and reads about one a week.)

    But, we don’t have to choose, for ourselves at least. If you’re hiring, yeah; there are a lotta people with a piece of paper but no experience. Not a tough call for me.

    For myself, I read books to see what they have to teach me, but as you say, I do it with myself in the center. If someone teaches something that I know is ‘wrong’, I’m not likely to change my mind.

    If I experience something totally contrary to what I believe, you’d best believe it’s got my full attention.


  • Mike Nitabach - February 11, 2010 at 9:06 pm #

  • In my experience, the bottom line here is that the only way to really learn is to make mistakes, and the only way to make mistakes is to try shit and fail. You can’t fail while reading something in a book or listening to someone tell you something, and thus you can’t make mistakes, and consequently can’t learn.


  • Devdas Bhagat - February 14, 2010 at 6:15 am #

  • To me, book smarts allow for strategic thinking. Street smarts are tactical, here and now. It’s a different mindset for an entirely different class of problem.

    Ideally, you want both together, but that isn’t always possible. As some of the other commentators have said, book smarts give you a map, street smarts don’t.

    Also, book smarts tell you when to apply those street smarts. Street smartness is highly contextual, and outside that context, they lose big.


  • g2e - March 10, 2010 at 5:32 pm #

  • It seems that there is no one key to success in life. Academic knowledge and intellectual ability certainly play a big part in the foundation of a successful career. But it also requires vision, charisma, a good work ethic, and not a bit of intuition to pull everything together. Success is not behind just one door. It’s behind several doors, and series of doors, so you’re going to need more than one key.


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