I read this conference talk the other day and — as tends to happen with these things — it turned out to be exactly the thing I needed to study right now. First off, it’s a fantastic talk and if you haven’t yet, go back and listen to it right now! It fit right in to my recent reflections on digital minimalism.

Second, I was feeling inspired and wanted to share some thoughts about it — I’ve talked a lot about these themes of attention, social media, focus, mindfulness… and this talk really got me thinking about it all. So I sent a quick note to Rio from Work + Wonder — she’s the creator of those awesome general conference workbooks I’ve raved about — they’ve been doing write-ups on the conference talks every week, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to see if they needed someone for this talk.

Go figure, turns out the person who was supposed to write that week wasn’t able to and she was scrambling to find a solution when my email popped in her inbox! So I got a really special opportunity to sub in! Here is a clip from my article:

“As I read Elder David P. Homer’s talk, a question struck me: how much time am I spending with my own internal voice, compared with the time I spend listening to the voices of others?

Elder Homer quips that we sometimes “crowdsource guidance in our lives, thinking the majority will provide the best source of truth.” At first I giggled – I’m definitely guilty of asking for opinions on which couch to buy or which haircut to get via Instagram polls! – but here’s how I believe we do crowdsource the serious stuff in our lives: when we are spending more time immersed in feeds or articles full of other people’s opinions, experiences, values, and priorities, we subconsciously begin to internalize those as ours – or at least as ones we should aspire to.”

Read more here 🙂