Claim: Imagination is a more valuable asset than experience.
Reason: People who lack experience are free to imagine what is possible without the constraints of established habits and attitudes.
Imagination is the ability to form pictures, think of creative ideas and solutions to problem-solving. To experience means to undergo a process or to have a hands-on encounter with an event. There is value in both imagination and experience, but is imagination more of an asset, because it lacks boundaries and disciplines, and hence is more expansive and free-flowing? Certainly not.
A person who has much imagination and spends his days developing his dreams, and building larger and more elaborate castles in the air, is akin to the man with many wonderful suggestions but never does anything to attain any concrete success. A person with experience is the one who has created ideas in his mind, and takes the time, trouble, and effort to add life to them. He takes the risks to plant the seed of his imagination, nurtures it through time, and effort, fights off problems that come along and sees it to fruition. Along the way, experience teaches us to reflect, organise and plan. These skills pave the way for more success in the next endeavour.
Let's take the example of the the artist, a person with great imagination, a person who looks with his mind's eye, so to speak. He is someone with immense and unbounded imagination. But as long as he does not act on it, we will not know his genius. What is worse, he will not sell any art, or earn a living. Today, we marvel at the art of Picasso and Van Gogh because they did not just imagine, they acted on their creative ideas, went through the processes of art, and continued to create even more complex masterpieces on canvasses and paper as time went on.
On a more pragmatic note experience is more valuable because of the ancillary values one accumulate from being hands-one. People with business ideas, who take the risks and act on them, start a business, run it and problem-solve a long the way, learn much more than the person who just thinks of how he would run a company. Experience therefore, is more valuable because of what you gain from hand-on learning, problem-solving requires lots of creative solutions and imagination.
In conclusion, I strongly disagree that imagination is more valuable than experience. Although both virtues have to work hand in hand, experience is the more valuable of the two, because it requires of one, to put in the hand-ons work of starting , and following through on what would otherwise be just dreams.
Reason: People who lack experience are free to imagine what is possible without the constraints of established habits and attitudes.
Imagination is the ability to form pictures, think of creative ideas and solutions to problem-solving. To experience means to undergo a process or to have a hands-on encounter with an event. There is value in both imagination and experience, but is imagination more of an asset, because it lacks boundaries and disciplines, and hence is more expansive and free-flowing? Certainly not.
A person who has much imagination and spends his days developing his dreams, and building larger and more elaborate castles in the air, is akin to the man with many wonderful suggestions but never does anything to attain any concrete success. A person with experience is the one who has created ideas in his mind, and takes the time, trouble, and effort to add life to them. He takes the risks to plant the seed of his imagination, nurtures it through time, and effort, fights off problems that come along and sees it to fruition. Along the way, experience teaches us to reflect, organise and plan. These skills pave the way for more success in the next endeavour.
Let's take the example of the the artist, a person with great imagination, a person who looks with his mind's eye, so to speak. He is someone with immense and unbounded imagination. But as long as he does not act on it, we will not know his genius. What is worse, he will not sell any art, or earn a living. Today, we marvel at the art of Picasso and Van Gogh because they did not just imagine, they acted on their creative ideas, went through the processes of art, and continued to create even more complex masterpieces on canvasses and paper as time went on.
On a more pragmatic note experience is more valuable because of the ancillary values one accumulate from being hands-one. People with business ideas, who take the risks and act on them, start a business, run it and problem-solve a long the way, learn much more than the person who just thinks of how he would run a company. Experience therefore, is more valuable because of what you gain from hand-on learning, problem-solving requires lots of creative solutions and imagination.
In conclusion, I strongly disagree that imagination is more valuable than experience. Although both virtues have to work hand in hand, experience is the more valuable of the two, because it requires of one, to put in the hand-ons work of starting , and following through on what would otherwise be just dreams.