Liebig’s Law of the Minimum

11,108 views

There is a law called Liebig’s Law of the Minimum. This was announced by Justus von Liebig, a German chemist. It states that the growth of plants is controlled not by the total amount of available resources, but by the scarcest resource. An image of a barrel—often called Liebig’s barrel—can explain this law: Just as the capacity of a barrel with staves of unequal length is limited by the shortest stave, so a plant’s growth is limited by the nutrient in shortest supply.

Although a man is healthy, if one of his organs is not good, his lifespan is shortened. No matter how smart a student is, if he or she doesn’t get a good grade at one of the subjects, his or her whole grade goes down. Love is the same. Sacrifice, gentleness, humility, consideration, peace, yielding, patience, self-control, unity . . . If we lack even one of these things, we cannot achieve complete love.

We must think about what we are lacking in to make our love complete, and must pay attention to the lacking parts and fill them up.