"The Power of Words."

Here is a transcript of Mohammed Qahtani’s presentation. 

 

What ?

 

All you are thinking smoking kills and let me tell you something. 

 

Do you know that the amount of people dying from diabetes are three times as many

people dying from smoking? Yet if I pulled a snicker bar nobody would say anything.

 

Do you know that the leading cause of  lung cancer isn’t actually a cigarette it's your DNA. You could smoke for years and nothing would ever happen to you.

 

This whole war against smoking it just to restrict the farming of tobacco.

 

 Mr. Carter's chair, fellow Toastmasters and guests, I use these arguments, even though I just made them up with a group of my friends and the results 5 of them believed what I said. 2 of them started smoking.

 

Words when said and articulated in the right way can change someone's mind. They can alter someone's belief. You have the power to bring someone from the slums of life and

make a successful person out of them. 

 

Or destroy someone's happiness using only your words. Does that seem a bit too good to be true? 

 

A simple choice of word can make a difference between someone accepting or denying your message. You can have a very beautiful thing to say but say it in the wrong words and it’s gone.

 

I have a son who's 4 and he had this bad habit of writing on the walls with crayons and one evening I walked into his room and his going at it just writing and drawing and so on.

 

And I said “Hey! Hey! Hey! Are you stupid don't you ever do that again.”

 

And guess what happened, he did it again.

 

Nobody likes to be threatened nobody likes to be intimidated his pride would not allow it He did it again just to spite me.

 

A week later I walked into his room and again he's going at it and this time he was even looking at me.

 

I came down and said sweetie come here don't do that you're a big boy now and he never did it again because his pride wants him to be the big boy.

 

Have you ever wondered why nobody cares about global warming, even though it's a very serious issue. It could kill all of us.  

 

Because when you go home when you flip on the TV and you see a scientist trying to talk about global warming it goes something like this;

 

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm as you can see from the graphs here the sensation for, for 2014 it shows the water level is rising. This, this table shows that the more drastic level and the third ozone layer is in an alarming position. 

 

The message never get across, but most importantly if you are a person who's a role model if you're a person who's been admired anything you say could be believed. 

Anything you utter could be taken as truth.  

 

My friend Nasir he loved his father idealize his father he would do anything to make him happy but his father was the kind of person who's not easy to impress.  And year after year Nasir tried and his father's like “yeahnm”. Fortunately in college Nasir got straight A's and he thought to himself this is it! This will finally make my dad proud he picked up the phone he called his dad. “Dad I got straight A's are you proud”?

 

Please tell me you are proud father. “Yeah listen son I'll have to call you back I'm busy.” 

 

I'm busy was the single sentence that broke the camel's back and he started drinking doing drugs hanging out with the wrong crowd.  Nasir why? Why are you throwing your life away?

 

“If the one person in the world that I care about the most doesn't care then, then why should I?  

 

And one evening I got the phone call, Nasser’s in the emergency room drug overdose!

 

I rushed to the hospital, I saw him on that bed and I saw that machine go beep, beep, beeeeeeep and I saw doctors try to bring him back to life “Clear! Clear! Clear!

 

It's clear that a single word could have saved this life.

 

Words have power. Words are power. Words could be your power! You can change your life,  inspire a nation and make this world a beautiful place.

 

Isn't that what we all want? Isn't that why we are all in this hall?

Your mouth can spit venom or it can mend a broken soul. Ladies and gentlemen let that be our goal

 

Carter sir