Neil deGrasse Tyson has spent most of his life looking up.
As an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, he has made a career out of explaining the cosmos to the rest of us, distilling light years into metaphors and black holes into dinner table conversation.
Like Carl Sagan, he’s a scientist with the soul of a poet, which is maybe why, every now and then, he says something that hits pretty deep.
On a recent episode of his popular podcast StarTalk, Tyson was reflecting on the difference between science and creativity. In just a few sentences, he said something every creative person needs to hear.
In science, he explained, if you don’t make a discovery, eventually someone else will. The truths of the universe are already out there, baked into the laws of physics and waiting for someone to uncover them. If not Newton, then Leibniz. If not Darwin, then Wallace. It might take a while. It might be by accident. But it’s inevitable. These things will be found.
Creativity is different.
While science is about discovering what is, art is about creating what isn’t. The creative act says that if you don’t create the thing, no one else ever will. No one before you. No one after. If you don’t paint that piece, write that song or tell that story, then kaboom. It disappears. Not postponed. Not redirected. Gone.
Think about that the next time you’re second-guessing yourself at 2 a.m. staring at a half-finished screenplay. Think about that the next time you’re wondering if the world really needs your weird little ceramic bird sculptures or your one-act play or your side project on Substack that three people read. (Hi, Mom.)
Here’s the thing. Your work isn’t just original. It’s unrepeatable. What you make doesn’t exist unless you make it. There’s something both terrifying and electrifying about that. It means no one’s coming to save your ideas. No one else is going to finish your painting. No one else is going to write the book that has been haunting the back of your brain for the past six years. That’s on you. No one is going to do that because no one else can.
You may not have tenure. You may not be trending. You may not get algorithmic validation. But you do have something that no one else on Earth will ever have: you.
When you make something from that place, no matter how small or strange or unfinished it feels, you’re doing something miraculous. You’re bringing into existence a version of the universe that literally would not have existed otherwise. If that’s not cosmic, I don’t know what is.
I’ve been around long enough to know that doubt never fully goes away. Imposter syndrome doesn’t care how many awards are on your shelf. The blank page doesn’t care how many deadlines you’ve met. The work is hard, and it never gets any easier.
Stop trying to justify your creativity. Stop trying to measure it against some arbitrary standard of success, productivity or ROI. It’s not a race. It’s not a stock. It’s not a formula waiting to be solved by someone else.
It’s a calling. And when you ignore it, when you postpone it, diminish it, delay it, you’re not just letting yourself down. You’re letting the world go without something only you can offer. That is a very big deal.
You don’t have to change the world. You don’t have to be a genius. But you do have to show up. Because when you don’t, that song, that sketch, that story, that campaign, it doesn’t just stay hidden. It disappears. Lost to the island of what might have been.
So, please. Write it. Paint it. Say it out loud. Build the thing that’s been rattling inside your chest forever. Not because it’s destined to go viral. Not because someone else told you to. But because it’s the only proof that you, creative you, were here at all.
Neil once said that science reveals how small we are, how tiny our planet is, how brief is the time we have. But creativity reminds us that we’re not just made of atoms. We’re made of choices.
So, choose to make something that didn’t exist before you willed it into being. In the end, that might just be the most human thing we do. ca