Neil deGrasse Tyson's Ultimate Advice for Students & Young People - HOW TO SUCCEED IN LIFE
i bet most of your people have sat in
this chair it's not about what college
they went to
it's about their own initiative their
own drive their own ambitions
their own curiosity
i can say from the era in which i grew
up i don't give a rat's ass what you say
to me
okay you can only be ridden if your back
is bent
on my tombstone i want the epitaph
be ashamed to die until you have scored
some victory for humanity
many people look for meaning in life
as though it's going to be under a rock
or behind a tree
well there's my meaning you have more
power than that
you have the power to create meaning
in your life rather than passively
look for it meaning to me is do i know
more
about the world today than i did
yesterday that enhances meaning
for me and if that accumulates and
accrues daily
in a month you you know way more than
you did than just that day later
so that you continue to grow my first
question of me wasn't
where do i find meaning it was how do i
create meaning and that started early
early teens you can draw a line in the
sand between people
who transgress but do not hold power
over you
there's a famous quote from martin
luther king
you can only be ridden if your back is
bent
when i grew up it was very common to
hear the phrase
sticks and stones can break my bones but
words will never hurt me
i haven't heard that phrase in a long
time i don't hear it recited
in the elementary schools what i think
has happened over the years
is we came to learn as a civilization
that
words can be hurtful that's an advance
in
in mental health what i see on the flip
side of that coin however is people are
less
able to deal with the very same people
who are around today who were around
back then
who are calling you names i can say from
the era in which i grew up
i don't give a rat's ass what you say to
me unless you are between me and some
goal
then i'll have to navigate that some way
if there's a racist person or a sexist
person or
a person with some kind of cultural bias
i want to know that actually i want you
to say everything you want to say
then i'll say okay that's who you are
that's how you're thinking
so now what do i need to do because
you're in my way do i dig
under you go around you leap over you
or do i go this way and then come out
the other side yeah it's longer it's
more effort
it's more energy but on some level it's
sort of the same
different day i can't say you're being
racist you're being like that's not
you got to navigate it i think high
school
that's where you learn how to deal with
difficult people there are people who
are
nasty you're going to have to navigate
them there are people who
you cannot interact with for whatever
reason or another they're going to be in
the cubicle next to you
in your workplace so i think we
undervalue the total social
pot that people are tossed into in their
high school experience
they want to say oh i could have learned
more but i had to deal with all these
people hey
having to deal with all these people is
now in your portfolio your motivation
for the guests that you have in this
couch
they they had some vision statement
and they have grit okay they got knocked
down they stood back up they tried
another way they got knocked down again
then they were successful either
measured by wealth or influence or or
just joy in
their life's passions for me what i do
for the public
80 plus percent of it is driven by
duty not by
ambition that's how i view it if that
were the case this is how i ended up
posting
cosmos in 2014 andrew the widow of carl
sagan
who was hugely talented she approached
me and said
would you consider hosting cosmos i said
i don't
there's a dozen people maybe half dozen
others who would jump at this
opportunity
i don't need to do this i really don't
then i thought about it and i said well
i met carl sagan when i was 17.
i was applying to colleges he was at
cornell i had been accepted to cornell
but was didn't know what college i
wanted to go to
and the admissions office saw that i
wasn't totally
in the moment there they had forwarded
my application to him
for his reaction and he sent me a letter
and i get this letter and i open and
says i understand you like
the same stuff i like do you want to
come visit the campus to help you decide
if you want to go to cornell
he met me outside his building on a
saturday
it sounded really cool he reached back
grabbed a book off the shelf it was one
of his books and he signed it to me
neil tyson future astronomers signed
carl
later in the day i'm ready to go back to
new york it begins to snow as it does
often in december in ithaca
and he says here's my home number
if the bus can't get through from the
snow spend the night with my family
and go back tomorrow i'm thinking who am
i why why
i'm nobody but i was somebody to him
and i said to myself if i'm ever as
remotely famous as he is
i will treat students the way he has
treated me if we can fold this memory
into this this next cosmos then we have
way to justify who and what i am as the
next host
because a torch got passed
it wasn't passed in 2014 it was passed
in 1975
to neil tyson future astronomy i still
have that book
and what is an adult scientist but a kid
who's never lost the curiosity i bet
most of your people have sat in this
chair it's not about what college they
went to
it's about their own initiative their
own drive their own ambitions
their own curiosity that is not
taught in school sadly
school they view you as this empty
vessel that they pour information in
and you test it over here you get a high
grade you're praised
you might even give the commencement
speech is that who become the shakers
and movers of the world
i don't think so when you come down the
steps on the last day of school you are
not
singing the alice cooper song school's
out forever
you'll be there'll be a sad song you'll
be singing
saying gee i gotta go two or three
months without
learning anything you should be sad that
school is over
not happy and so you leave school
and you say to yourself i now know how
to learn
i now have a curiosity of all things i
have yet to be exposed to
and i will now become a lifelong learner
i read things that take me to places
where other people think
what was it about your dad that impacted
you so much that you still carry today
for me at least was what level of wisdom
did he glean in his life and then
successfully communicate to me either by
example
or by just explicit statement in high
school
he was in gym class and they were lining
up
and they were about to enter the next
athletic unit and it was track and field
and the gym instructor pointed to my
father online
and said cyril tyson everyone look at
him
he does not have the body type that
would excel
in track and he says what
no one is going to tell me what i can't
do
in my life and he used that
as a reason to start running
within a few years of that he became
world class in 1948
the olympics was not yet ready to come
back to us because we're still
reeling roiling from the second world
war
instead there was still an olympics it
was called the gi olympics
and it was held in hitler's stadium
so he competed in hitler's stadium
uh in the late 1940s but reason i'm
saying all of that is is a friend of his
name johnny johnson
they were competing against the new york
athletic club the new york athletic club
at the time accepted only white
protestants
so there was another club called the
pioneer club which took everybody
who was not accepted to the new york
athletic club which was basically blacks
and jews
and his best friend johnny johnson okay
was coming around the back stretch might
have been the quarter mile
coming on the final straightaway and a
runner from the new york athletic club
is a few paces behind him
and johnny johnson overhears that
runner's coach
say catch that
and he overheard this so what did he say
to himself
he said this is one he ain't gonna
catch
that extended his his his lead
to the finish line and he tells this
story
not with any bitter tone
it was here's an occasion to parlay
what today might be called a
microaggression into
a reason to excel even more than you
had expected of your own abilities and
talents my last question
what's the impact you want to have on
the world my impact would be
people learn from me
in a way that they are empowered
by what i taught them so that when they
think of what they learned from me they
no longer think of me
they think of their own base of
understanding of how this world works
i become irrelevant
and because if people say this is true
because tyson said so then i failed
that's not how you teach someone that's
that's teaching them by authority
i don't you know just no i want to i
want to teach you how to think about the
world
and then you say i have a new way to
understand the world and you just run
off don't
you don't even look back because a new
level of hunger has descended upon you
and
methods and tools to feed that hunger
are now accessible to you
so my impact would be that
others are impacted and they don't
even remember that i had something to do
with it
[Music]
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