Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Speech Will Leave You SPEECHLESS – One of the Most Eye Opening Speeches Ever

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 they used him as an example 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 and he started track in that moment he decided that his one of his next tasks in life would be to take up running and excel at it within a few years of that he became world class at one time had the fifth fastest time in the world 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 alongside jewish athletes so there they are competing against the new york athletic club 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 and so what did he say to himself he said this is one he ain't gonna catch and that extended his his his lead to the finish line at the end of the day what matters is for who and what you become in life 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 and that combination of those two means of delivery had some important uh impacts we live in a very fractured world today i don't know if it's the most fractured ever but what is clear is that the internet has enabled in social media have enabled people to tribalize you might go your whole life without ever finding another person who thinks the earth is flat you go online and you see them all so you have ways to say why you are different from other people and i don't know that that's always a healthy place to be you can draw a line in the sand between people who transgress but do not hold power over you from those who transgress and do so the coach who said catch that he doesn't have power over johnny johnson unless you allow him to there's a famous quote from martin luther king you can only be ridden if your back is bent i apportioned my emotional reactions to where it actually mattered for my life's trajectory 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 this was an inoculation against hate speech really against just evil people just nasty people you able to develop a system of defenses against unpleasant people out there and 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 and words can sort of change your mood or set you into a depression what i see on the flip side of that coin however is people are less able to deal with the very same people who were around today who were around back then who are calling you names the people who might be bullying you on the internet by saying things about you we i don't know that we have how to defend against that now other than seeing a counselor for your emotional state 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 um unless you are between me and some goal then i have i'll have to navigate that some way 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 you got to navigate it i think high school that's where you learn how to deal with difficult people there's not a single high school movie that doesn't show the angst of the cliques that have formed and what the relationships are that they have to one another it's this microcosm of real stuff that goes on in the real world there are beautiful people and they will get jobs you're not gonna get okay there are people who are nasty you're gonna have to navigate them there are people who you cannot interact with for whatever reason or another they're gonna 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 for me what i do for the public is prime almost 80 plus percent of it is driven by duty not by ambition because i can do something and if i can do it better than others and it's for a greater good in society i would be irresponsible if i did not that many people look for meaning in life and i'm thinking to myself you have more power than that you have the power to create meaning in your life rather than passively look for it so for me i create the meaning and 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 no one ever told me that i had to search for meaning in life to begin with so that was never even a part of me 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 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 i can tell you this if we're if einstein were here and we're talking with einstein we can talk them for hours and hours and hours you know what question will never come out of our mouths is what college did you go to i want to go to that same college 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 should as a minimum preserve that curiosity for you it yeah if you lost some of it because it's not going to be in all of us put it back in so that when you graduate school you can give literal meaning to the word commencement commencement means beginning it doesn't mean ending 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'm a scientist um raised catholic but started drifting when i was like in third grade none of it was making much sense to me there were no decisions made in the house that referenced the bible or god or jesus or anything so in that sense decision making was secular and rationally informed and i thank my parents for that i valued that as someone being raised by them because it meant if something didn't make sense they'd do it because i said so well that's not a rational reply to your child they would have the reason for it and