Motivation Daily by Motiversity - The Most Valuable 20 Minutes Of Your Day | Best Motivational Speech - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the deeper questions that shape who we are and why we exist. In this powerful and thought-provoking video he uses his wisdom, logic, and cosmic perspective, to challenge us to look beyond the surface and consider the impact we were meant to make in this universe.Special thanks to:The Diary of a CEOTom BilyeuMusicConfidential Music Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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The link is in the description. Do we matter? So the cosmic perspective is incompatible with your ego. Okay. All humans share a chemistry, a biology with all other life on Earth. There's one genesis on this Earth. What is the advice that you wish someone had said to you? At 33, but you could give to me now.

I have no such advice, and I'll tell you why. If you're alert and you're smart, alert meaning you notice things and you learn, living life itself is the lesson. This is life experience, and it doesn't come on a bumper stick. You're thinking this is one sentence I could tell you, I could tell you and then you, that'll make everything better. No, no. Learn from your mistakes

because those lessons are greater than someone just telling you to not do it. 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. It was, I got my life, this is who and what I am, this is what I did in school, these are my dreams, ambitions, how do I create meaning in my life as I go forward? My first question of me wasn't, where do I find meaning? It was how do I create meaning? And that started early teens. I recognized long ago that I have the power to manufacture meaning in my life.

I can make decisions about my own life that create the meaning. For me, a meaningful life is learning something new tomorrow that I didn't know yesterday. Otherwise, it's a wasted day. You know the prisoner who puts exes in the boxes on the wall for the day they get out? I have that in my head, and the day that I get out is the day I die. All right? And what these boxes remind you of is every day you're alive, you're one day closer to death.

So there's one fewer days in there to accomplish something that you might have wanted to accomplish. So one of my measures of meaning is how much more do I know about the world tomorrow than I did yesterday? Because almost any path you take will make you wiser as a person. So I value wisdom that gives meaning to my life. A new perspective. It's not just knowledge, data. Data can become information. Information on further study becomes knowledge.

and after enough time, when you see how the knowledge plugs in and applies, it can become wisdom. Wisdom is the distilled essence of all the details. The wisest statements ever spoken to you generally have no detail in them at all, do they? It's, as I've heard it said this way, wisdom is what's left over after you've forgotten all the details. It's the distilled essence of it all. So I want to be wiser on the porch On my rocking chair I don't want to be the old commugent

And my day we did it best No I don't want to be that guy No Spend a little bit of your life Lessening the suffering of others I don't mean to redirect your life Some people do They work in soup kitchens and start not-for-profits

To serve Yes I'm not that person No because the universe is what calls me, but in my day, in a week, do something that lessens the suffering of someone else. I'm declaring that.

I try not to ever put opinions out there, but it's my opinion that if you lessen the suffering of others, you make a better world. And don't we all want to live in a better world? If there's some small gesture that I can do that can completely add value to someone's life, I'm going to do it. Because the leveraging of 10 minutes of my life into the happiness or enlightenment or the reduced suffering of someone else, I'd be irresponsible if I did not. What is missing from your list of ingredients at the moment?

Or what could you have more of that would make you happy? I don't think of life that way. Okay. How do you think of life? Why is that wrong, that question? I didn't say it was wrong. I don't value judge, okay? It's not what's right or wrong here. It's, it's, I don't live life that way because it means you carry with you the emotions. I could be happier if I were doing this and how come I'm not? And all of a sudden, well, then I must be miserable if I'm not as happy as I could be.

No, I don't measure day to day. Am I happy or not? It's not the measure. Yes, it's in there, but that's not the metric. The metric is, am I successful at what I'm doing? Am I as good at this as I can be? If you're not going to try to improve, go home, find something else. When I saw that what I did did not serve the needs,

I invested a lot of energy so that I could be exactly what they needed, so that their task is simplified, and I get better at something that could serve a greater good. I don't want to say that's happiness. I'm going to say that's fulfillment of an objective where I improved in what it is I was doing.

We're all very different people. And so meaning ought to be different. If meaning was the same for everyone, you just publish it, everyone reads it, and then we all have meaning. No, you've got to make it yourself. Some people want to search for it, fine. I don't have a problem with that.

I'm not searching for meaning. I'm creating meaning in my life because I can control that. Not that it's important to control everything. You know, I like magic as an adult because it reminds me I can still be fooled. Okay? That's, so I don't need to know everything. I just need to maintain curiosity. The cosmic perspective shows you how small we are.

in size, in time, in space. And if you go in with a high ego, you might resist that. You might say, no, I'm important. But I think of it differently. We know one of the greatest gifts of modern astrophysics to civilization, dare I call it a gift, is the knowledge that the atoms of your body are traceable. not only to the Big Bang origin of the universe itself,

but especially to stars that have manufactured those elements and later in their lives on death exploded, scattering that enrichment across gas clouds, so that their next generation of stars would have planets and on at least one of those planets, life. We are not just feeling, figuratively, we are literally stardust. So when you go out and look up at the night sky,

yeah, your urge is, I'm small and that's large. And yes, you're alive in this universe, but there's another way to look at it. The universe is alive within you. You have kinship with the cosmos. That feeling to me is greater than any ego you could have possibly walked into the room with. First, that feeling borders on spiritual. Second, third, we have trained ourselves to equate being special with being different. You're special. You do

something, thinks some way that no one else does. So I'm special. Well, let me turn that on its head and say, maybe we're special, not because we're different, but because we're the same. All humans are stardust. All humans share a chemistry with all, a biology, with all other life on Earth. We live in a very fractured world today. I don't know if it's the most fractured ever, but, I mean, the first, First World War, those were fractured times. So I don't want to claim uniqueness in how fractured we are, but what is clear is that the

Internet has enabled, and 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 and they have conventions and they meet here, even if it's It's only virtual. 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. In a pluralistic land, you want to celebrate differences rather than go out of your way to establish differences

and then claim one group is better than another. It is the very motto of the United States, out of many, one, the pluribus unum. You can carry that forward to immigration and the ethnicity, the melting pot of ethnicity that was the goal, or at least the vision for what we thought of future America would be. And I don't feel it heading that way now. So, but you can draw a line in the sand between people who transgress, but do not hold power over you. But what are you actually after by attacking someone with a different opinion? Oh, I know what it is.

You want everyone to have exactly the same opinion you do. Well, that's not this country either. No. You know what's on our currency? On our currency, e pluriblus unum. Okay? Out of the many, we have one. Not out of the one, we have one.

It is the many. It is the plurality. Pluribus. It's plurality. It's Latin, okay? A plurality means people coexist who think differently about the world. And we celebrate that, or at least we ought to. By the way, if you just reject what someone says outright, that's as intellectually lazy as it is to accept what they say outright. What's harder, but I think more fun, is lining up a series of questions to probe the statement, to explore. What is going on in the thoughts and in the claims of the person with whom you're conversing?

So if someone says, I have these crystals, that you rub them together, it'll heal you. My kids would say, what are the crystals made of? And what tests have you made for this? And could the healing have been explained in another way? And in what way are the... And they start asking these questions, and then the person would probably just walk away because they would not have the answers to all of them. And then you know, remember, I said, if an argument lasts more than five minutes,

then both sides are wrong. The person, there's nothing, there's no place for that to go. To the truly curious person. Given what you know today, what would you tell yourself if you met yourself when you were 15, 20, 25, 30, whatever? And I said, I wouldn't tell them anything. Because if I gave a bit of wisdom, I say, you're about to do that, but don't do that. Okay?

There's no better lesson than doing something and learning that you shouldn't do it. That's the best lesson. We don't live life because there's a list of things that other people said don't do. You're going to explore your life. That's what you're going to do. And some things are great and some things you don't want to do again. Some things you're bad. It's where the wisdom comes from.

You earn it. It's the most, it's the most, it's the strongest kind of wisdom. you can have provided you learn from a mistake. If you're just an idiot, you just keep making the mistake, my advice were you was don't make the same mistake twice. Just stay alert, learn new stuff every day, and learn from your mistakes because those lessons are greater than someone just telling you to not do it,

then you have no such life experience to build into the wisdom that you want to acquire in the years to come. It is the first painting I know of where the background is the subject of the painting. And that background is the night sky. It is true because... To learn is to become closer to nature. And it's for a greater good in society.

I would be irresponsible if I did not. The universe is immense. And yes, it can make you feel small as it ought to. We all need an ego check. People like to think I'm special because I'm different, but there's a whole other way to look at it. Maybe you're special because you're the same. Have I, by whatever powers I have available to me,

have I lessened the suffering of others? Earth seen through the rings of Saturn. And just a reminder, we are a speck in the middle of a cosmic void. And the more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world. Thank you. Perhaps one of the greatest science communicators of our time, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has been educating people about the world around us for years. Not only is he incredibly knowledgeable, but his love for science and his ability

to convey that passion is what sets him apart. His journey to becoming one of the most well-known astrophysicist started as early as nine years old. At 17, he would be invited to Cornell to meet with world-renowned astronomer Carl Sagan. Then I thought about it, and I said, well, I had met Carl Fisagin. Sagan when I was 17. I was applying to colleges. He was at Cornell. I had been accepted at 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 for, I didn't know this, they had forwarded my application to him for his reaction. I was already deep in the universe since I was nine and he sent me a letter.

He doesn't know me from Adam. I'm a 17 year old kid from the Bronx. He's a professor of astronomy at Cornell University and I get this letter and I opened and says I, 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? It was like, whoa, this is, now he hadn't done Cosmos yet. That's how old I am. But he was already famous. He'd been on the Tonight Show and, you know, and had best-selling books.

So I took him up on it. I took a bus up to Ithaca, New York. He met me outside his building on a Saturday, invited me up to his office, saw the labs, I'm there in front of me. He did something really cool. He reached back. Didn't even look. Grabbed a book off the shelf. It was one of his books. I thought that was the baddest. That was a badass thing. Don't even have to look. That's one of my books. Yep. Okay. Here. And he signed it to me. Nealtex future astronomer signed Carl. But that's not, that's only the half of it. Later in the day, I'm ready to go back to New York. It begins to snow, as it does often in December in Ethaca. And he says, here's my home number. If the bus can't get through from 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. I already knew I wanted to become a scientist, but that afternoon, I learned from Carl the kind of person I wanted to become. Hi, James. Hi. So you look just like a kid astronaut. So, And you're about the right age that if we go to Mars for real, you're going to be the right age then that we'll be sending you. But before you go, make sure they have enough money to bring you back. If NASA wasn't greater, what would happen to our universe?

If NASA weren't around, what would happen to our universe? Well, I can tell you this. If NASA weren't here, we would know a lot less about the universe. We wouldn't know a single thing about the universe. We'd just be rummaging on Earth's surface, thinking that our solutions to all our problems come from looking down rather than from looking up. You got it, okay.

Hi, what's your name? Jacob. And how old are you, Jacob? Nine. You're nine. Jacob, I was nine when I first discovered the universe. Actually, the universe discovered me. I was in a planetarium, and the lights went out,

and the stars came out and I was nine and my head exploded. And you will not be one of these idiots who were interviewed when the asteroid was coming saying I'll go get drunk on the beach because you will figure out how to save the world. Thank you, Jacob. In 2014, Neil would become the host of Cosmos, a spacetime Odyssey, a follow-up to the original series created by Carl Sagan 34 years prior. Cosmos would go on to be translated into 45 languages, run across 181 countries and be seen by over 750 million people.

Neil continues to educate the public on the wonders of the universe through his radio show StarTalk. At the end of one of his StarTalk live shows, he reads for the audience one of the most impactful pieces of writing from Carl Sagan's pale blue dot. From this distant vantage point, the earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. consider again that dot that's here that's home

that's us on it everyone you ever heard of every human being who ever lived out their lives the aggregate of all our joys and sufferings thousands of confident religions ideologies and economic doctrines

every hunter and forager every hero and coward every creator and destroyer of civilization every king and peasant every young couple in love every hopeful child every mother and father every inventor and explorer

every teacher of morals every corrupt politician every superstar every supreme leader every saint and sinner in the history of our species live there on the mode of dust

suspended in a sunbeam the earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel

on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. It is a lonely speck enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, There is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It's up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, character-building experience. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.

There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, settle. Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the earth is where we make our stand. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish. That pale new god, the only home we've ever known.