In most professions and academic fields imagination is more important than knowledge

Imagination never goes in vain if you have the right knowledge and skill to pursue it. Once people start working on their innovative ideas with the right knowledge, they can change the world altogether. The author’s statement that in most professions and academic fields, imagination is more important than knowledge is not valid and rife with assumptions and situations not taken into consideration.

Some professions and academic fields call for imagination more than knowledge. For example, in the field of dancing, the dancer must permeate his/her imagination on how he/she can perform different dance styles unconventionally. Knowledge is also important, but sometimes, it leads to ossified rules, because such knowledge is departed by experts, who have performed the same dance styles for veritable number of years. Adherence to certain canons occludes one’s thinking and imagination. Similarly, a tyro poet or author cannot succeed unless she is able to think outside the box. One cannot just depend on the canons of poetry or literature to write something valuable. The person has to widen her imagination in order to write something palpable. Imagination plays an insurmountable role in stories and poems, in order to make the audience feel what the author/poet is feeling.

In contrast, there exist some professions and academic fields, which require knowledge more than imagination. Without the knowledge of the subject, there is no use of imagination whatsoever. For example, an engineer, who wises or imagines to build a robot who does all the household chores and every possible work, which a human can perform, will only be able to execute her idea if she has the required knowledge of programming and mechanics and other required area. She won’t be able to build something just with imagination, knowledge is required to execute or perform the task. Considering the case of Facebook, the idea of such a platform was first thought by Winklevoss twins, but Mark Zuckerberg was the brains behind it, and today, people link Facebook with him only, not the twins.

The arguments delineated above are two extremes cases. There exist some situations where imagination and knowledge play two sides of the same coin. There are some professions and academic fields where both, imagination and knowledge play a vital role. Entrepreneurship, for instance, cannot be a profitable field if the entrepreneur lacks ingenuity and knowledge on how to execute the idea. Without either of them, no organization can stay solvent, let alone burgeon. There exist many more such professions where one needs to put imagination into play to make the concepts clearer. A teacher, for example, in order to make the class interesting needs to apply innovative ideas and lessons so that, the students, with concomitance to learning, enjoy, too.

Succinctly, even though the author’s statement is true, there are situations where knowledge plays a more vital role than imagination or both the factors have equal importance. It depends on which field a person is in. Even in extreme cases, like the ones delineated above, a touch of imagination/knowledge is necessary to make the plan unique and successful. An artist cannot make a painting sell for thousands of dollars with the help of only imagination, he/she needs to know the knowledge of colors and the right technique to make the painting one of a kind.