Here’s something that will likely surprise you: As a kid, Neil deGrasse Tyson was not a model student. He has recounted how the majority of his teachers thought he showed little potential—and rather than sing his praises in parent-teacher conferences, they harped on the “disruptive” student for such infractions as … laughing too loudly in the classroom.
Tyson, as it happens, was busy outside of it.
Ever since he visited the Hayden Planetarium at age 9, he had a singular goal: to become an astrophysicist. Growing up in an apartment complex in the Bronx, he also had a dog. His neighbors had dogs—and they all needed to be walked. If he walked his dog plus two others, he could net $.50 per dog per walk. And so, after parading around enough pups during middle school, the moment he had been waiting for arrived: He was able to buy a good telescope, an SLR camera, and the related gear to document what he saw on it. Now, after lugging it up to the roof of his apartment complex (and convincing a family friend who lived on the 19th floor to run an extension cord for him), he thrilled in obsessively studying the universe before him.
Of course, “none of this was visible to the teacher,” he says. “All they care about is the grades you get on the exam that they administer. And so that’s a very narrow understanding of success in this world. And people who succeed in spite of that do so because they have some belief in themselves. What school does not code for is ambition: How much do you care about what you care about?”
Throughout his career—as a world-renowned astrophysicist, director of the planetarium that initially sparked his passion, host of “Cosmos” and StarTalk, and a ubiquitous presence on the cultural landscape—writing has long been central to his output.
He’s penned more than a dozen books, including the bestsellers and , and his latest, , which details how science can provide a lens to envision a better collective future for
