Great cities attract ambitious people, and there’s always a sense that you could do better in these cities.

Different cities are ambitious in different ways though. New York is about money, Cambridge is about intelligence, and Silicon Valley is about power.

• Berkeley sends the message that you should live better, but it isn’t humming with ambition.
• The big thing in LA seems to be fame.
• In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who you know.
• The message Paris sends is: do things with style.
• In London you can still (barely) hear the message that one should be more aristocratic.
• Not all cities send a message. Only those that are centers for some type of ambition do.

History shows that where you live has a big impact on you, and great things tend to happen in clusters. It’s wise to take advantage of this and use it to your advantage.

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.

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.

• You don’t have to live in a city to do great work. For some fields (like math) you just need a handful of talented colleagues around you. It matters more for fields like the arts or writing or technology, because in these fields the good people aren’t conveniently gathered together for you, so it’s important to be in the place that maximizes your chances of encountering them.
• 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.

Because ambitions are to some extent incompatible and admiration is a zero-sum game, each city tends to focus on one type of ambition.

It’s tough to know what a city is like without living there, so your best bet is probably to try a bunch of places while you’re young.