Not overwhelmed...just whelmed.

May 2008

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.

_____

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.

As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of
the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. What makes it
true is that it’s more preposterous to claim about anywhere else.
American universities currently seem to be the best, judging from the
flow of ambitious students. And what US city has a stronger claim? New
York? A fair number of smart people, but diluted by a much larger
number of neanderthals in suits. The Bay Area has a lot of smart
people too, but again, diluted; there are two great universities, but
they’re far apart. Harvard and MIT are practically adjacent by West
Coast standards, and they’re surrounded by about 20 other colleges and
universities. [1]

Cambridge as a result feels like a town whose main industry is ideas,
while New York’s is finance and Silicon Valley’s is startups.

_____

When you talk about cities in the sense we are, what you’re really
talking about is collections of people. For a long time cities were
the only large collections of people, so you could use the two ideas
interchangeably. But we can see how much things are changing from the
examples I’ve mentioned. New York is a classic great city. But
Cambridge is just part of a city, and Silicon Valley is not even that.
(San Jose is not, as it sometimes claims, the capital of Silicon
Valley. It’s just 178 square miles at one end of it.)

Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one day the most
important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and it won’t
matter where you live physically. But I wouldn’t bet on it. The
physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways cities
send you messages are quite subtle.

One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge every
spring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can see into
the houses. 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. Palo Alto was probably much like Cambridge in
1960, but you’d never guess now that there was a university nearby.
Now it’s just one of the richer neighborhoods in Silicon Valley. [2]

A city speaks to you mostly by accident—in things you see through
windows, in conversations you overhear. It’s not something you have to
seek out, but something you can’t turn off. One of the occupational
hazards of living in Cambridge is overhearing the conversations of
people who use interrogative intonation in declarative sentences. But
on average I’ll take Cambridge conversations over New York or Silicon
Valley ones.

A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst
thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping. At
the time I thought she was being deliberately eccentric. Sure, it can
be interesting to eavesdrop on people, but is good quality
eavesdropping so important that it would affect where you chose to
live? Now I understand what she meant. The conversations you overhear
tell you what sort of people you’re among.

_____

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.

There’s an imbalance between encouragement and discouragement like
that between gaining and losing money. Most people overvalue negative
amounts of money: they’ll work much harder to avoid losing a dollar
than to gain one. Similarly, though there are plenty of people strong
enough to resist doing something just because that’s what one is
supposed to do where they happen to be, there are few strong enough to
keep working on something no one around them cares about.

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. Professors in New York and the Bay area
are second class citizens—till they start hedge funds or startups
respectively.

This suggests an answer to a question people in New York have wondered
about since the Bubble: whether New York could grow into a startup hub
to rival Silicon Valley. One reason that’s unlikely is that someone
starting a startup in New York would feel like a second class citizen.
[3] There’s already something else people in New York admire more.

In the long term, that could be a bad thing for New York. The power of
an important new technology does eventually convert to money. So by
caring more about money and less about power than Silicon Valley, New
York is recognizing the same thing, but slower. [4] And in fact it has
been losing to Silicon Valley at its own game: the ratio of New York
to California residents in the Forbes 400 has decreased from 1.45
(81:56) when the list was first published in 1982 to .83 (73:88) in
2007.

_____

Not all cities send a message. Only those that are centers for some
type of ambition do. And it can be hard to tell exactly what message a
city sends without living there. I understand the messages of New
York, Cambridge, and Silicon Valley because I’ve lived for several
years in each of them. DC and LA seem to send messages too, but I
haven’t spent long enough in either to say for sure what they are.

The big thing in LA seems to be fame. There’s an A List of people who
are most in demand right now, and what’s most admired is to be on it,
or friends with those who are. Beneath that the message is much like
New York’s, though perhaps with more emphasis on physical
attractiveness.

In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who you
know. You want to be an insider. In practice this seems to work much
as in LA. There’s an A List and you want to be on it or close to those
who are. The only difference is how the A List is selected. And even
that is not that different.

At the moment, San Francisco’s message seems to be the same as
Berkeley’s: you should live better. But this will change if enough
startups choose SF over the Valley. During the Bubble that was a
predictor of failure—a self-indulgent choice, like buying expensive
office furniture. Even now I’m suspicious when startups choose SF. But
if enough good ones do, it stops being a self-indulgent choice,
because the center of gravity of Silicon Valley will shift there.

I haven’t found anything like Cambridge for intellectual ambition.
Oxford and Cambridge (England) feel like Ithaca or Hanover: the
message is there, but not as strong.

Paris was once a great intellectual center. If you went there in 1300,
it might have sent the message Cambridge does now. But I tried living
there for a bit last year, and the ambitions of the inhabitants are
not intellectual ones. The message Paris sends now is: do things with
style. I liked that, actually. Paris is the only city I’ve lived in
where people genuinely cared about art. In America only a few rich
people buy original art, and even the more sophisticated ones rarely
get past judging it by the brand name of the artist. But looking
through windows at dusk in Paris you can see that people there
actually care what paintings look like. Visually, Paris has the best
eavesdropping I know. [5]

There’s one more message I’ve heard from cities: in London you can
still (barely) hear the message that one should be more aristocratic.
If you listen for it you can also hear it in Paris, New York, and
Boston. But this message is everywhere very faint. It would have been
strong 100 years ago, but now I probably wouldn’t have picked it up at
all if I hadn’t deliberately tuned in to that wavelength to see if
there was any signal left.

_____

So far the complete list of messages I’ve picked up from cities is:
wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political
power, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality of
life.

My immediate reaction to this list is that it makes me slightly
queasy. I’d always considered ambition a good thing, but I realize now
that was because I’d always implicitly understood it to mean ambition
in the areas I cared about. When you list everything ambitious people
are ambitious about, it’s not so pretty.

On closer examination I see a couple things on the list that are
surprising in the light of history. For example, physical
attractiveness wouldn’t have been there 100 years ago (though it might
have been 2400 years ago). It has always mattered for women, but in
the late twentieth century it seems to have started to matter for men
as well. I’m not sure why—probably some combination of the increasing
power of women, the increasing influence of actors as models, and the
fact that so many people work in offices now: you can’t show off by
wearing clothes too fancy to wear in a factory, so you have to show
off with your body instead.

Hipness is another thing you wouldn’t have seen on the list 100 years
ago. Or wouldn’t you? What it means is to know what’s what. So maybe
it has simply replaced the component of social class that consisted of
being “au fait.” That could explain why hipness seems particularly
admired in London: it’s version 2 of the traditional English delight
in obscure codes that only insiders understand.

Economic power would have been on the list 100 years ago, but what we
mean by it is changing. It used to mean the control of vast human and
material resources. But increasingly it means the ability to direct
the course of technology, and some of the people in a position to do
that are not even rich—leaders of important open source projects, for
example. The Captains of Industry of times past had laboratories full
of clever people cooking up new technologies for them. The new breed
are themselves those people.

As this force gets more attention, another is dropping off the list:
social class. I think the two changes are related. Economic power,
wealth, and social class are just names for the same thing at
different stages in its life: economic power converts to wealth, and
wealth to social class. So the focus of admiration is simply shifting
upstream.

_____

Does anyone who wants to do great work have to live in a great city?
No; 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.

What cities provide is an audience, and a funnel for peers. These
aren’t so critical in something like math or physics, where no
audience matters except your peers, and judging ability is
sufficiently straightforward that hiring and admissions committees can
do it reliably. In a field like math or physics all you need is a
department with the right colleagues in it. It could be anywhere—in
Los Alamos, New Mexico, for example.

It’s in fields like the arts or writing or technology that the larger
environment matters. In these the best practitioners aren’t
conveniently collected in a few top university departments and
research labs—partly because talent is harder to judge, and partly
because people pay for these things, so one doesn’t need to rely on
teaching or research funding to support oneself. It’s in these more
chaotic 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, and since you have to find peers for yourself, you need
the much larger intake mechanism of a great city.

You don’t have to live in a great city your whole life to benefit from
it. The critical years seem to be the early and middle ones of your
career. Clearly you don’t have to grow up in a great city. Nor does it
seem to matter if you go to college in one. To most college students a
world of a few thousand people seems big enough. Plus in college you
don’t yet have to face the hardest kind of work—discovering new
problems to solve.

It’s when you move on to the next and much harder step that it helps
most to be in a place where you can find peers and encouragement. You
seem to be able to leave, if you want, once you’ve found both. The
Impressionists show the typical pattern: they were born all over
France (Pissarro was born in the Carribbean) and died all over France,
but what defined them were the years they spent together in Paris.

_____

Unless you’re sure what you want to do and where the leading center
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. Often your
information will be wrong: I tried living in Florence when I was 25,
thinking it would be an art center, but it turned out I was 450 years
too late.

Even when a city is still a live center of ambition, you won’t know
for sure whether its message will resonate with you till you hear it.
When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It’s an
exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn’t
like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York.
It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown by air.

Some people know at 16 what sort of work they’re going to do, but in
most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to be
ambitious about. They know they want to do something great. They just
haven’t decided yet whether they’re going to be a rock star or a brain
surgeon. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it means if you have
this most common type of ambition, you’ll probably have to figure out
where to live by trial and error. You’ll probably have to find the
city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.

Schultz is back with Big Idea No. 2. It is every bit as idealistic as his first big idea, but far more practical. Starbucks is going to create a mechanism that will allow us citizens to do what the government and the banks won’t: lend money to small businesses. This mechanism is scheduled to be rolled out on Nov. 1. This time, Schultz is not tilting at windmills.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got, back when I was 23 and newly out of school, is this: look around and figure out who you want to be on your team. Figure out the people around you that you want to work with for the rest of your life. Figure out the people who are smart & awesome, who share your values, who get things done — and maybe most important, who you like to be with and who you want to help win. And treat them right, always. Look for ways to help, to work together, to learn. Because in 20 years you’ll all be in amazing places doing amazing things.