Lighting the Trail

Bottom Line Up Front: This article explores how AI can support real-world training and curriculum development, especially in environments with limited time and high expectations. You’ll learn how AI tools can break down complex goals into clear weekly steps, generate support materials like worksheets and activities, and even help design ceremonies or milestones that reflect your values. It’s a case study in using AI not to replace human leadership, but to scale it — with clarity, empathy, and purpose.

This year, I had the honor of serving as the Cub Scout Leader for our city’s Arrow of Light den — a small band of kids standing at the edge of something they could not yet name. The path before them stretched wide and full of old hopes. But this year, the trail was steeper. The requirements grew harder, the demands greater. And since we could only gather when the school doors opened to us, the clock began ticking loudly from the very start.

In September of 2024, I sat down with the challenge. I turned to the tools at hand — even the ones stitched from silicon and code. I used AI to lay out every requirement like stepping-stones across a stream. It helped me craft a full curriculum, broken into handouts, activities, and tasks small enough to be tackled by boys with busy hands and bright, distracted minds. Week by week, night by night, we moved forward. And this last week, after a couple camp outs and countless gatherings, the last kid crossed the line. 

The last Arrow of Light badge was earned. No one had been left behind.

When you set out to teach yourself — or others — a new skill, the road ahead can feel like a tangle of half-seen trails. AI, if used rightly, becomes less a crutch and more a lantern. It shines a steady light over the whole landscape: gathering scattered requirements, mapping out milestones, even helping dream up ways to make the journey lively and real. You ask it questions, not as a master to a servant, but as a craftsman to his tool — shaping rough stone into clear steps. What once loomed large and unclear shrinks down into tasks you can hold in your hand, one by one.

The heart of building a training plan with AI is much the same as planning any good trail: know where you are, know where you must end, and lay down a path that fits the feet that must walk it. Break the work into weeks, weave in time for wonder, for failure, for rest. AI can draft worksheets, sketch outlines, suggest small games or challenges, but the spirit — the true breath behind the work — still has to come from you. A good plan, like a good journey, needs more than clear steps; it needs a heart that believes the goal is worth reaching.

After the kids had crossed the finish line, I wanted to shape a Bridging ceremony worthy of their journey. I gathered old, good ceremonies — each holding some fragment of beauty — and turned again to AI. Not to replace the soul, but to weave something fit for a night of firelight and stars. I asked it to tread carefully, to honor the faiths these kids carried, and to step lightly where Scouting had stumbled before. What came back was a bridge of words and signs strong enough to hold the weight of their crossing. And so, under the cold watch of the stars and the hush of tall trees, a kid stepped forward. No borrowed feathers, no masked legends. Only firelight, and the weight of a promise to continue to grow and walk the path.

Even now, with all our cleverness, we stumble. We reach for meaning and for beauty and sometimes seize what is not ours to hold. Yet here, in the crackling dark, a small truth stirred: a machine — trained on mankind’s flood of collective utterances, had set it right when it was asked to. The machine gave back a scene bare of pretense, past mistakes, and hurtful imagery, and laid out a ceremony full of simple truths of a child leaving behind childish things and making a promise to their peers and parents to grow into an adult.

In the end, this year showed me something simple but lasting: when used rightly, AI can serve the work of the hands and the heart. It can take a tangled, half-seen trail and make it walkable. It can gather scattered hopes and shape them into something steady.

It can help organize complex goals, breaking them down into clear, living steps.

It can design full curriculums, rich with handouts, tasks, and small weekly victories.

It can build training plans that leave space for wonder, for failure, and for rest.

It can draft the small things — worksheets, outlines, games — that breathe life into learning.

It can blend old traditions carefully, shaping ceremonies that honor faith, family, and the deeper story we all walk.

It can quietly correct our stumbling, stripping away what wounds and keeping what heals.

It can help shape true storytelling, anchoring us back to the heart of things — to what is honest, what is lasting, what is good.

AI cannot walk the path for you. It cannot teach love, or courage, or the weight of a promise made beneath the stars. But it can carry the lamp. It can steady the hand that sets each stone along the way. And sometimes, if you ask it with care and a clear heart, it can help you shape a night — a memory — where something true is passed from hand to hand.