But there are exceptions, famous people who mastered skills that have nothing to do with what we know them for. For example ...

Tom Cruise would probably be a shitty plumber. The truth is, most people are only extraordinarily great at one thing (if that) and celebrities are no different -- Shaquille O'Neal was a fine basketball player but would likely not have become famous if he'd focused entirely on acting and rapping.

8 Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson Was a Muscle-Bound Wrestler

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You're probably familiar with astrophysicist and Internet darling Neil deGrasse Tyson, part of that rare breed of gifted scientists who can be almost supernaturally smart without being intimidating (it helps that he doesn't have a robot voice). Whereas your third grade math teacher seemed like the scariest person on the planet for knowing how to multiply, Tyson knows the secrets of the cosmos and still manages to look like an adorable nerd.

But that wasn't always the case, as this old photo of him proves:

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Each of his arms is bigger than Bill Nye.

That's Tyson as a college wrestler. Back before he became head of the Hayden Planetarium, Tyson was a regular high school student like the rest of us, with dreams of one day pile-driving the universe and other fellows in unitards. So he became the captain of his wrestling team, and he absolutely looked the part:

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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We'll spare you the "we got us a badass" joke (but we do).

So he must have gone to grad school to study science and meme creation and gave up sports, right? Nope. Tyson still wrestled competitively deep into his Ph.D. progress, even if it meant sacrificing his free time. To show you the level of commitment this guy had to both astrophysics and pinning muscular dudes to the ground, he says at one point he tried to create a new wrestling hold based on "a phenomenon in orbital mechanics called a double tidal lock," but he could never get it to work.