Here’s a Scoutmaster’s Minute on the subject of experience:
You don’t lack intelligence, fortitude, motivation or common sense; you lack experience.
You get experience from trying things out, from EXPER-imenting , from experiencing the results of your actions.
How do you think the wild mushroom called the Death’s Cap got it’s name? Experience.
Somebody told me that orange and chocolate tastes pretty good together. I think they do too. How do I know? I tried it!
I’ll trust someone else’s experience on how the death’s cap got its name. But I wanted to find out for myself about the chocolate and orange thing.
One of the best things in life is trying and discovering new things, learning how things work, seeing new places, meeting new people. In the course of doing these things you are going to make mistakes. You have to make mistakes, there’s nothing wrong with mistakes, what you want to avoid is making poor choices.
There are times when people my age worry about people your age. We talk to you (just like I am doing now) and try to explain the way things work; how to make good decisions. Sometimes you listen and sometimes you don’t. I assure you that was exactly what we did when we were your age. We can’t save you from every bad experience out there – a lot of that is up to you.
You’ll find that the more good decisions you make the more decisions you’ll be trusted to make for yourself; if you make poor decisions it’s more likely that you won’t be able to make many of your own decisions.
So let me tell you a sure-fore way to make good decisions and have good experiences – test what you are planning to do against the Scout law. If your actions reflect the ideals in the Scout law you can be sure its a good decision and good decisions lead to good experiences and experience helps you learn and grow.