Skills vs knowledge
When you think about the greatest possessions that a person has, that make them more powerful and better as a human being, you might go materialistic and think of ‘money’ or you might go the other way round and think about the idea that money is not everything and start pondering upon stuff like meaningful relationships ,love and other things are most likely to be intangible. But, if you go into the depth of this you might want to reconsider your thoughts. All the things that you thought of when asked about the greatest possessions, namely money, relationships or even a job that you love, are all attracted mainly by two thingsskills and knowledge. Let me explain it to you. Without the knowledge about earning and managing money and without having the skills of being a good conversationalist , executor, you can never make money. Similarly, without the knowledge about the things that make a relationship meaningful and without the skill of actually using the knowledge to make a person feel better about you and give you more value, you can never have meaningful relationships in your life. Those are your actual greatest possessions -skills and knowledge. They do appear to be pretty much the same, but they do have subtle differences that should not be ignored and this is what will talk about – the differences between skill and knowledge (aka skill vs knowledge ). Knowledge refers to the information that a person acquires about a particular topic or subject, be it practical information or theoretical information. It is acquired through sensory inputs :touching ,reading ,smelling, hearing, listening, etc. It is essentially a certain degree of familiarity with the facts and concepts related to any possible topic. It can be gained through books, podcasts, etc. Skills however, are methods and ways by which one can make use of the knowledge he possesses and apply it to specific situations. Skills are developed through practice or sensory input and output. These are the proficiencies developed through either training or experience. In short, knowledge is theoretical, whereas skills are practical application of that knowledge. Knowledge can be acquired by learning theoretically while skills can only be acquired by performing the activity or following the ‘trial and error’ method which is considered to be the best method for acquiring skills. For instance, a person knows everything about cricket – all the teams, players, stats, etc. He knows about cricket history and all the big upcoming fixtures. He also has practical knowledge about cricket like how to hit a drive, how to bowl, etc. Everything mentioned above is knowledge. Now, that same person, if asked to play cricket, may not be able to do so as he has never actually played the game before. This shows that knowledge does not lead to better skills, it can only be learnt by going through the physical act of whatever you want to be skilled at. Another point to be noted is that skills are of two types of an acquired and innate. A quiet skills are the ones that you learn on your own by practicing and in innate skills are the ones that you are born with . This is not the case in knowledge as every single piece of knowledge we gain has to be learnt on our own through various mediums like books, educational institutions, courses, etc. Knowledge is shareable. This means that if a person has information about something, he can share it with another individual by communicating it in speech, signals or writing. On the other hand, skills are hardly something that one can share. For example, Lionel Messi, if asked to teach you football, will only be able to tell you how to do certain things or at maximum would be able to show you how to do it, all of which, would be only knowledge to you. You have to apply that knowledge practically to get skilled at it. To sum this all up, knowledge is theory and skill is application of that theory. While learning a skill you might develop new knowledge, but you cannot develop a skill just by gaining knowledge on it. Practice is the only way to improve your skills just a the famous saying goes “There is no substitution for getting your hands dirty.”