I have always been a advocate from learning from books. Frequently in my career this has been met with resistance and the old adage "there is no substitute for experience." I absolutely agree that experience is important, even essential. But I absolutely disagree that there's a dichotomy between these two ends of the spectrum and that experience is always the best approach.
There's one reason that I think book learning is often better. I could not go out and gain experience equal to the research done, and lives lived, by Daniel Kahneman, Donella H. Meadows, Chris Voss, and Carol Dweck. I would need multiple lifetimes to build the same level of expertise, the only way to tap into their experience is to learn from them through their writing.
Hypothetically if I'm getting 10% of the value out of each year of experience put into a book then any book which is the accumulation of more than 10 years of experience (pretty much all of them) would be more valuable in building my context than a year of experience.
But more importantly, book learning gives us the context and language to understand our experience. It amplifies our experience WHILE it makes us more impactful and effective as we live those experiences. It supercharges the revision of context in the Hermeneutic Circle which drives our interpretation of things and events in the world.
As an added bonus, I stumbled on this old note that I don't remember writing: The Book Learning Equivalency Proof. This was my exceptionally nerdy attempt to show that book learning is a type of experiential learning.
- p. 118
