This morning a friend reminds of a Paul Graham article from 2008 titled Cities and Ambition. It’s excellent. For those of you who don’t know, Paul is the outspoken founder of Y Combinator—a prominent early-stage startup investor in Silicon Valley.
The general thesis of Paul’s article is simple yet elegant. Cities speak to us. They influence our behavior. They shape who we are. It matters where you live. A lot I would argue. The essay leads with this:
Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.
When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.
That's not quite the same message New York sends. Power matters in New York too of course, but New York 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. The reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically everyone.
He continues:
How much 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. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.
You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. 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, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him?
If even someone with the same natural ability as Leonardo couldn't beat the force of environment, do you suppose you can?
I don't. I'm fairly stubborn, but I wouldn't try to fight this force. I'd rather use it. So I've thought a lot about where to live.
I'd always imagined Berkeley would be the ideal place—that it would basically be Cambridge with good weather. But when I finally tried living there a couple years ago, it turned out not to be. The message Berkeley sends is: you should live better. Life in Berkeley is very civilized. It's probably the place in America where someone from Northern Europe would feel most at home. But it's not humming with ambition.
In retrospect it shouldn't have been surprising that a place so pleasant would attract people interested above all in quality of life. Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge. The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. You have to make sacrifices to live there. It's expensive and somewhat grubby, and the weather's often bad. So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.
There’s a lot more in the essay. I encourage all of you to read it—more than once. I also encourage you to pick up a copy of The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley, a book by journalist Eric Weiner that goes deep on the history of a bunch of this stuff.
“Where do I want to be?” is a question I ponder a lot, especially as I wrestle with ambition on one hand and things like self-care and familial responsibilities on the other. I believe many people in my demographic—career-focused city-dwellers (with or without families)—ponder this question constantly.
The four cities I know best are Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, and London. Of course my perception of each is colored to some degree by the circumstances of my life at the time I was living there, but overall, I think they hold up pretty well.
Chicago says to me: have a good time and strike a balance. I was in school and much younger then, so that’s surely a part of it. However, Chicago’s laid-back Midwest vibe is unmistakable, and people tend to have good balance between work and play, with a clear lean towards the latter.
San Francisco has changed. I first moved there before the financial crisis and tech boom that has since followed. Back then, it said to me: get outside and enjoy beautiful things. The city has a very different message today that I don’t care for—arrogance, excess, and above all, a lack of care for others and for the community.
Washington is about being part of something exclusive. This starts with schooling—Washington is notoriously snobby about educational pedigree. You then succeed by choosing and then navigating exclusive organizations. It’s who you know not what you know. Or more to the point, who important likes you and who doesn’t. Washington’s main industry—politics—is inherently rent-seeking and zero-sum. It’s a beautiful city that I love dearly, but for these reasons, entrepreneurial ambition isn’t a part of the social fabric.
Finally, London. This is a hard one because London is so different. It’s the literal melting pot of the world. It’s also a city-state inside of a country that is at war with itself. London says many things, but if I have to distill it to one it is this: be who you are. I feel very free here. Sure, there’s more than a whiff of aristocracy, and if you care about “society” things, you’re probably on the outside looking in. But overall, this is a city where working class and ruling class live in relative proximity. Where people are into a lot of different things and come from many walks of life. London is wild. London is weird. London is cool. It’s also a giant pain in the ass to live in most of the time and it’s a god damn fortune to be here. The weather isn’t nearly as bad as everyone says it is, but it’s not great either. But I guess that’s the point: people have to give up a lot to be here and yet they do it anyway because they’re gaining even more. Otherwise, they wouldn’t do it.
That’s what my city says to me. What does yours say to you?
