San Francisco

I feel empowered after going to San Francisco.

Let me try to unpack that:

• I've always had a hard time finding people like me, ambitious, hard-working, not content with being just a cog in a machine.

  But I found a whole city of this kind in San Francisco — builders who don't just want to build; and researchers who don't just want to research.

• It's a great city, the talent density is truly unmatched; I've never met so many people that I respect and am willing to learn from in one place! They are more determined than I am, more resourceful than I am, more creative than I am. They are thinking harder, dreaming bigger, doing faster than I am. If that's not interesting, I don't know what is!

• I've met them, they aren't that different from me. I can do it too. I feel a lot more confident as a result.

  Location affects the vibe that you're infected with [1]

I never felt that even in entrepreneurship and builder clubs in Beijing and Tainan.

No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do. [2]

A nice heuristic I developed to understand the vibe of a city (or a group of people) is to ask the people you meet "what are you worried about?" You get a proxy of what they think on a daily basis as a result.

In some cities, you get answers like "how to get an internship", "how to get a job", "how do I get a master's degree"; in San Francisco, I get "how do I reduce customer churn", "how do I scale my company 10x and sell it ASAP", "how do I invest in the next transformational technology before it's too late?".

The conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you're among. [2]

It's so important to get into the right city for you, or it's easy to get discouraged.

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. [2]

[1] The Unfair Advantage by Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba

[2] Cities and Ambition by Paul Graham