Pay Attention | Daniel Midson-Short | TEDxTemecula transcript

[Music] [Applause] There she was right in front of me. She was looking at me and I was looking right back at her. She had this mysterious smile on her face. It was one of those moments that you never forget. Ladies and gentlemen, friends, and family, I hope you'll indulge me today as I share with you a love story. And like all great love stories, this one starts in Paris. Let me set the scene for you. A young Australian man, ruggedly handsome, slightly delusional, is strolling the streets alone, and he stumbles upon one of the most iconic buildings in all of Paris, the Louv Museum.

On a whim, I decided maybe I'll go inside and see what's in there. As I descended into that glass pyramid, I could feel the culture and history start to wash over me, and I got lost in the artwork and the sculptures. After about an hour of wandering around, I found a long hallway. And at the end of the hallway was a huge open room. And at the far end of the room in the distance, I could see a mysterious woman. And she was looking right at me.

So, I looked right at her. Now, this sounds like the setup of a really romantic story. There's only one problem. I was a 35year-old guy and she was a 500year-old woman. She was the Lja, better known as the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. It's valued at over 34 of a billion dollars. She was stolen once by a Louv employee and hidden in his basement for two years. And today she lives behind bulletproof glass in a humidified air container under constant surveillance of security.

For me to see this masterpiece up close was so exciting. But there was another problem. I wasn't the only person who had that idea. And if you've been to the Louv Museum, you know exactly what I'm talking about. This is the site that greets you when you get to the room where the Mona Lisa is. It's been said that seeing the Mona Lisa face to face has all the thrill and joy of standing in the security line at the airport.

But I figured, you know what? I'll wait my turn. So, I stumbled forward. And as I got closer to the front, I realized something very strange. I was one of the very few people looking at the Mona Lisa. Everybody else was doing this. And when they were done, they were just walking away. They maybe looked at the real thing for one or two seconds and they looked at their phones for about 15 minutes. I looked at these people and I thought, "What a bunch of idiots.

They've traveled halfway around the world and they're missing this masterpiece five feet in front of them. And then I looked down in my hand and I had my phone ready to take my picture of the Mona Lisa and I thought, why? It's not like I can't go on Google images and get a life-sized blown up image of the Mona Lisa. And yet, I had this obsession, this compulsion to capture. and not just capture but share. So I could tell all my friends that I was at the Lou in front of the Mona Lisa.

Why? No one asked me to capture it and share it for them. I just had this compulsion like every single other person in that room. Why are we like this? Well, that became my quest to understand what's happened to us as a culture and as a world. Why are we so enamored with technology? Now, I grew up at a unique time in history. It was called the 1980s. [Applause] And for those of you who were there, you had one telephone in your house.

It had this long cord that was stuck to the wall. You had a television with three channels and the height of technology was the Betamax video recorder. Now, if you grew up in that time or you were alive then, you lived at a very unique time. You lived in a world that was pre-in. In 1991, a man named Tim Berners Lee created the worldwide web project. And this was the first time in history that someone with a under a 200 IQ could actually access the internet.

And thanks to him and a whole bunch of other smart people, we've gone from one website in 1991 to over 1 billion today. Now, of course, today we don't use technology as much on desktops. We use it in our hands. Our smartphones today have more power than whole rooms of computers had in the 1970s. It's a miracle what we can do right here. And yet, most of us live our life inside these little boxes. They're called apps.

It's amazing to think only 10 years ago these didn't exist. But today, you can do all these really cool things like you can Google and you can Uber and you can Netflix and chill. If you don't get that, ask someone later. And when I first started seeing people getting obsessed with their phones, I thought I was the only one who was noticing. I thought, "You're a genius, Daniel. No one else is noticing, but they're all stuck like this." But then I did a bit more research and I realized there's a lot of other smart men and women who know a lot more about this and have been studying it a lot longer than I have.

And I learned three significant things about why we're so obsessed and enamored with technology. The first one is this need for novelty. If something is fresh or new, we can't resist it. You know, there's a reason they call it the news and not the olds. The second is the thrill of the chase. Now, if you've ever thrown a tennis ball to a puppy and you see that puppy's face, that that's what you look like when you're using Google.

And the third one is the rewards of the tribe. We all want to be important and recognized and acknowledged. And now today we get it through these little numbers on our screens. One, two, three notifications saying someone likes or commented or shared. That feels nice inside. Now you take any of these things by themselves and they're very appealing. You put them all together in a sexy little package, put it in your hand, and have it available 24/7.

It is irresistible. But what does this lead to? Well, the first thing I've noticed is it leads to this. We live in the age of narcissism. We're all curating our own content to improve our personal brand so we can get more followers and fans. And we're ignoring everyone else doing the same thing. But maybe even worse than this is distraction. If you've been to a music concert in the last couple of years, you've probably noticed musicians don't play to audiences anymore.

They play to cell phones. It's like all these people have to capture and share this moment because they're worried if they don't, they're going to miss it or they won't be able to prove that they were there. Ironically, I think that the opposite is true. So there she was right in front of me. Now I told you at the beginning that this was a love story. Truth is it was the end of a love story. You see six months earlier my wife and I had filed for divorce.

We'd always talked about going to Paris together, but it didn't happen. And the reason she told me she was so unhappy, I'll never forget. She said, "Daniel, I'm right in front of you, but you never pay attention." It took standing alone in that crowd to understand what she meant. For five years of my life, there she was right in front of me. She was looking at me, but I was too busy doing everything else. And standing there, I knew that I needed to change.

So, when I finally got to the front of the queue and I stood there with the Mona Lisa, I did something crazy. I put my cell phone away and I just looked at her. I looked at her face, her hands, the veil that sits lightly on her head. I looked at the background. I got a sense of who this woman might have been in the time that she lived in. And that's when it hit me. I know why we love the Mona Lisa so much. It's because she looks at you while you look at her.

She knows that the greatest gift that you can give to another person is presence. I walked out of the Lou that day a different man. My life has changed ever since. Now, I could spend another 10 minutes telling you how to focus, how to remove distraction, how to know what's truly important to you. But you know what? It comes down to two words. When you pay attention, you are paying with your life. Whatever you focus on, that is what's important to you.

You might say that you love your husband or your wife or your kids are the most important thing in the world, but your actions tell the truth about you. The comedian Louis CK has this great bit in one of his shows about parents at a children's dance recital. He says, "If these idiotic parents would just put down their phones for a second and have a look in front of them, their kids are in high resolution. It's amazing.

Thanks, Louie. It's funny, but it's true. At the end of the day, life is made up of moments and memories. And soon, even this moment will be a memory. But you and I can choose to take it with us if we choose to pay attention. Here you are right in front of me. You are here with me and I am right here with you. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]