In many cases: Yes. Otherwise you are stuck with book-knowledge and lack experience that can be shared, unless that experience is not experiencing.
Beer-Life Goggles
Developing in life is the same as drinking a lot of beer for the first time. They both start off quite scary and unknown to you. Until the point that you get drunk on either of them, throw up, and share the experience with others who went through the same thing. Then the only difference is that beer gives you liquid courage to do things you would normally have social boundaries for and that experience only gives you feedback that can later be called 'wisdom'. It is however, your wisdom. You take in everything you can, until your brain gets overloaded with information. So many names of new people you've met that you mix up their faces, their personal aspects, their birthdays. Kind of like Facebook. Thank science for digital birthday calendars.\
Half Full Glass, Half Empty Life
I like the metaphor of life being like a book and that never traveling means that you only read one page. However, I think a big glass of beer is a more realistic analogy: If you don't get to the bottom of it, you will never find out how far you can go. The truth behind the authentic emotions that go with being confronted with pain, regret, social embarrassment and judgements of others. But more importantly, how to overcome them. And it's easier to learn this in the setting of getting drunk once a month at uni, than at work later on. Never trying means you lose 100 % of the time. Just as fighting means that you have a chance to win, but not fighting means that you lose 100 % of the time. Interpret that how you want, but life is basically a series 'yes/no'-question on a second-to-second, hour-to-hour, day-to-day basis, depending on how much you integrate into society.
Serial Killer of Dreams
Similarly, there are always things you want to do in your life, but people have told you that it's “not a good idea” or “not the safest choice”. What they don't say however, is that everyone makes the easy choices, not always the right ones. Simply because it's easier to take the safe route and learning from a textbook, instead of learning by yourself and experiencing what those words in the textbooks actually mean. The memories of the actual events are more meaningful because they are yours. Not some idea that someone else told you is “the best way to go about things”. Next time someone asks you to do something less dangerous than risking someone's (social) life: don't doubt, just do it. And maybe, hopefully, you'll learn to never stop chasing your own dreams.
