our greatest gift as a species is not our body we're not the fastest
we're not the strongest our body hardly distinguishes itself in any way
in the animal kingdom our greatest sort of gift in the tree of life is our mind
maybe it is weak who are imprisoned thinking our body matters when in fact at the end of the day
it's really all about your thoughts all about your dreams
all about how we react to our life experience in this world and share it with others
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 wouldn't give
any advice at all because
the act of being 20 is itself part of what it is to become who you are
if you start siphoning information from the future
you the act of having learned it firsthand by experiencing is what made me the person
who would put me in a position to call the 20 year old and say here's the advice
the act of learning by life experience has sufficient value that to just have someone
tell you what you should or shouldn't do is not what makes you who and what you are
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
who and what you are is what you do and what you learn from what you did
yeah you can tell somebody something but if they don't think it's true it's it'll fall on deaf ears
let them find out and the act of finding out is the lesson not the lesson itself
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 written if your back is bent when i grew up it was very common to hear the phrase
sticks and stones could break my bones but words will never hurt i haven't heard that
phrase in a long time i don't hear it recited in the elementary school what i think has happened
over the years is we came to learn 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 unless you are between me and some goal then i'll have to navigate that somewhere
so there is nothing i can tell myself at any time in life because i am learning what it is
to be alive i'm learning what it is to become a scientist i'm learning what it
is when people treat me one way or another because they presume i should be an athlete
rather than a scientist that's life experience that feeds what i am today
even if i'm steeped in ignorance at some point in my life and then that gets figured out because
i visit someplace so i read a book it's life experience you can't just tell some of that 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 if there's a racist person or a sexist person or a person with some kind of
cultural bias i want to know that action 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
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
the immigrant who comes to america they come to america not a penny to their name and they
work hard and they they start a business and they finally get actually wealthy and
they struggled and they knew the meaning of a dollar and they and so then they have a
family and they say to themselves i i will never have my kids experience the poverty that i have
or the hunger or not knowing where the next meal that will not happen with my kids
the kids have everything provided for them and then they become deadliest
then the parent says where did i go wrong i gave you everything i didn't have it's the fact that
you started with nothing gave you the work ethic to become who you are so to turn around and say
now i'm going to change all that for my kids of course you no you don't want your kids to
go hungry so they become somebody like you but just don't presume that your latter day
knowledge your latter day wealth if introduced into a next generation as advice or as a handout
will create the person that you are in fact you can circumvent it it can derail that pathway
your motivation for the guests that you have in this couch they they had some vision statement
and their 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 andrea widow of carl sagan who was hugely talented she approached me and said
would you consider hosting conference i said i don't
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 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 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
something really cool he reached back grabbed a book off the shelf it was one of his books
and he signed it to me neil texas 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 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 a 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
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 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
you