Cities and Ambitions
Does it matter where you live?
TL;DR:
- Great cities attract ambitious talent.
- Where you live can have a great impact on what you become.
- Determined and ambitious individuals not living in great cities can still do great work. Thanks to the internet.
- All cities are not equally ambitious so it’s a good idea to try living in several places when you’re young.
Great cities attract ambitious people. They send messages in a hundred subtle ways: you could do more; you should try harder.
Messages can be surprisingly different from city to city. New York tells you: you should make more money. Boston (or rather Cambridge) tells you: you should be smarter. Silicon Valley tells you: you should be more powerful.
Power matters in New York too of course, but NY is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley, no one would care except a few real estate agents. What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world.
Does it matter what message a city sends?
Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment and where you live should make at most a couple per cent difference. But historical evidence suggests that it matters more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places.
For example, practically every fifteenth-century Italian painter you’ve heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren’t genetically different.
Cities talk
A city speaks to you through its people, through windows, in conversations you overhear. When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. In Cambridge, you see shelves full of promising-looking books. A city speaks to you mostly by accident. It’s not something you have to seek out, but something that you can’t turn off.
Influence
No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much about what a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.
Because ambitions are to some extent incompatible and admiration is a zero-sum game, each city tends to focus on one type of ambition. The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just that there’s a concentration of smart people there, but that there’s nothing else people there care about more.
Not all cities send a message
Only cities that are centres for some type of ambition send a message. And it can be hard to tell exactly what message a city sends without living there.
Ask yourself this: what message does the city that you are currently living in sends? If you are in Los Angeles then maybe it’s fame. Or maybe you are in a city that doesn’t send any message. Maybe people living in that city doesn’t care about any particular thing or aren’t that ambitious at all.
So do I have to live in a great city to do great work?
Not really. All great cities inspire some sort of ambition, but they aren’t the only places that do. For some kinds of work, all you need is a handful of talented colleagues.
In fields like math or physics, all you need is a department with the right colleagues in it. It’s in fields like the arts or writing or technology that the larger environment matters. It’s in these fields that it helps most to be in a great city: you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you care about the kind of work you do.
Parting words
Unless you’re sure of what you want to do and where the leading centre for it is. Your best bet is probably to try living in several places when you’re young. You can never tell what message a city sends till you live there, or even whether it still sends one.
If changing cities feels like too much to you, then there’s an alternative.
The internet has condensed space into our physical devices so you are no longer limited to a city or state. You now have access to thousands of people who probably are as ambitious as you, so why not hang out with them in online communities or interest groups that can be found on sites like Reddit or Discord. And who knows, maybe the next ambition centres will be online communities and interest groups rather than cities.
This shortbound was based on the essay titled “Cities And Ambition” by Paul Graham. Read it here.
And thanks for reading. We curate longform articles on entrepreneurship, technology and design by thinkers around the world and condense them into short reads. Our goal is to give you the most value for your time. Follow us for more stories.
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