Vishen Lakhiani describes an experiment where seeds exposed to insults grew stunted with upside-down leaves, while praised seeds grew tall and healthy. He argues negative words harm living beings the way they harmed the plants, using the comparison to show why bullying matters.
Chapters
Can I share with you something really freaking crazy? We did this little experiment and all of you watching can do this experiment. We took three little petri dishes and you can use a simple plate. And we put seeds on this. Some cotton bud with water and seeds. Okay, so A, B and C. So in one, it was basically the control group. We didn't do anything different. We just left it by a window. The second one was the negative. My team would look at the seed. I hate you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hate you. You're ugly plant. You're an ugly seed. I bet when you sprout, your leaves will be upside down. You'll be tiny. The other plants won't like you. You're a puny little pathetic plant, and I hate you. As nasty as you can get when you're talking to a plant. Now the third one, you would just praise it with compliments. You are going to have the most beautiful green leaves. You are going to be so beautiful, you're going to light up a room. I'm so proud of you. You're going to grow so tall and healthy. Okay, now look at the picture. This is the picture. And you can see the control group is mid size, the one that we insulted, the negative plant. The leaves are literally upside down. No way. And it's tiny and short. Now look at the tall one. That's the one that we express gratitude and appreciation to. So anybody can do this. In fact, in some schools, they are using this as an exercise to teach people the horrors of bullying. Because when you see how your words can affect a plant, which is a different species, you understand that your words can affect your body. Your words can affect other people. And by the way, all of these plants had the same amount of sunlight, the same amount of water. The only thing different was the emotion that was being passed to the plant. If we can influence the biology of plant life, imagine what this can do for human life. Yes. It also shows you how negative energy can really mess things up. The next time you think a negative thought about someone, what if, and I don't know if there's any studies on this, but what if, just like you were hurting the plant, you were physically hurting another person? Wow. And when you understand that, you start really watching your thoughts.
