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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 co
by padobson 9y ago
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.
This is exactly what I thought out of college. "I'm a product engineer! I can work from anywhere. I'm going to move back to my hometown and turn the rust belt economy around with a billion dollar startup!"
As it turns out, I didn't have the talent to start such a business by myself (and based on my knowledge of startup history, no one does).
And that's why this essay nails it.
In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
YOU may be a self motivated person, regardless of environment. But your founder may not be. Your first ten employees may not be. Your investors and vendors and strategic partners may not be.
When any of these stakeholders hang out with their friends in the rust belt, they hear depressing stories. They start to look at success like it's impossible, and they come back to work the next day less energized and less motivated.
Or maybe they've got a good circle of friends, but not an ambitious circle of friends. They love their friends, so they stay out with them a little later, sleep a little less, end up a little less productive the next day and leave work earlier to go meet them. Same thing goes for a family, but with the added responsibility.
This isn't to say that friends are bad or families will hold you back. In my experience, good friendships and a loving, functional family are better than any business success.
The point is that your environment will affect your ambitions - even if you never needed help feeling ambitious. At some point or another you'll need help for something, and if your city doesn't drive ambition in that direction, you'll have to work that much harder to motivate the help you need.
- dionidium 9y agoThis also applies to the oft-cited Good Will Hunting line about getting a great education for the price of some overdue books at the library. Yep, definitely, sure, you're right: you could definitely learn everything you would in college on your own. But you won't.
- philipkglass 9y agoThere are autodidacts who can go a long way with a big library (or nowadays: sci-hub, b-ok, MOOCs) and their own self-directed study. But if you haven't started on that path before finishing high school, it seems extremely risky to assume that you can start doing it instead of attending a university. Further, if you're already self-motivated and learning on your own, you're probably going to have a lot of (intellectual) fun attending one of the more rigorous institutions, learn faster with access to proper labs for experimental sciences, and fill in gaps that you might have tended to neglect with pure self-study. The credential will also be a big help later whether you want to go on deeper into research or find an "ordinary" full time job afterward. (College degrees are still economically worth it for those who complete the degree. If you can learn degree-material on your own you aren't going to be one of those sad cases who takes on student loan debt without graduating.) I hated school before I reached the university level. I maintained good grades but I was usually bored and learned most interesting things on my own. A university was the first place I found a majority of fellow students who were straining forward to learn due to interest in what they were learning. It makes the experience far different from being with people who are just being goaded forward by a teacher or evaluating everything in light of "will this be on the test?"
- soperj 9y agoYou must have gone to a University with better students than the one I went to, because the majority of the people I went to University with just wanted a piece of paper, and so "will this be on the test" was essential to their well-being and learning was at best secondary.
- philipkglass 9y agoI was a freshman in 1998 and received my BS 4 years later. Was your experience more recent? I wonder if my experience was better due to the respective schools we attended, the timeframe, or perhaps both. I get the impression that credentialism is still worsening over time. Intensified credentialism has the effect of diluting classrooms that could be engaging with a bunch of people who are just XP-grinding to level up to a job in 4 years. I do feel bad for people who are there due to distorted economic incentives rather than genuine interest. I also resent them for polluting the intellectual environment of students who are actually interested in the material.
- seem_2211 9y agoYep, agree with this 100%. I'm from New Zealand, but live in San Francisco. Went back a few weeks ago for a wedding, and was struck by how I had changed compared to the environment. I don't see how I could live back there in the next ten years (I'm only a few years out of college) without it having a significantly detrimental effect on my career. Simply put, my friends in San Francisco are smarter, harder working and more ambitious than my friends back home. I think a big part of this is that they've also all chosen to live here.