Where is the art capital of the contemporary world? If Paris is where people appreciate art, and New York is where people buy art, is there a single city better than others where people go to make art?
Cities and Ambition
81–90 of 313 posts
Re: Cities and Ambition
#82"Oxford and Cambridge (England) feel like Ithaca or Hanover: the message is there, but not as strong." There seems to be a lot of ambition in Ithaca, but the focus is on the collective rather than the individual. The messages that Ithaca sends are "make the community a better place, help the less fortunate, buy local food from the farmers market and co-ops, support local artists and musicians, attend community festiv…
I don't think that sounds like "ambition" at all.
If a collective cannot be ambitious, then it follows that a corporation or a web community cannot be ambitious. And yet that does not seem quite right. Or are you saying rather that a town could be ambitious, but that Ithaca does not seem to fit the mold?
Re: Cities and Ambition
#83"What happened to the Milanese Leonardo?" Just for the sake of argument, I can think of some counterexamples: Archimede living in Syracuse (not exactly the mathematics and engineering capital of the ancient world), Einstein in Bern, Bobby Fischer in NY (and not Moscow). I'm sure you can find many many more.
Syracuse was in fact probably the richest and most sophisticated city in the West at the time.
Re: Cities and Ambition
#84I've noticed messages as well: Gary, IN: Lock the doors. Do not stop. Macon, GA: You know, Atlanta is just up the road, right? Elko, NV: The only winners are the house and the mine owners. Milwaukee, WI: Fourth place is just fine, given enough beer. Clearly, I need to hang out in better cities.
Okay, me too.
Columbia SC: Uh, the culture is pretty much centered around it's mid-tier University of South Carolina, which is a party-hardy Frat/Sorority vibe. So, I guess it says "YEEE-HAAAAW! More beer, Bo!"
Hartford, CT: Unless you can calculate the death of a 55 year old smoker with no major medical history within a margin of error, the city says "There's NY below and Boston above, take your pick, pay your toll, and have a nice day."
Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University, UNC, Wake Forrest, North Carolina State, Shaw, and various other colleges all within around 20 interstate exits of each other. I guess it would say "study hard, and find job at IBM, Sony-Ericsson, or Cisco." Not too much entreprenurial spirit here, I guess because the tech giants gobble them up with nice offers right out of college.
Re: Cities and Ambition
#85I think Paul's right here, but there is one point that always irks me when he's talking about location: It comes off as assuming that the singular goal of your life is to start a successful startup and that having a successful startup makes you a great person. While we're throwing out city memes, here's what I'd peg my beloved Berlin: Break the rules.
See the last section of http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
Re: Cities and Ambition
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money and power are interchangeable Nearly, but not quite. For example, Linus Torvalds isn't rich by New York or Silicon Valley standards, but he's quite powerful nevertheless. And Barack Obama isn't particularly rich either, but he's on the brink of being perhaps the most powerful man in the world.
Obama is not the most powerful man in the world. If he is elected, he may be, but he won't be able to turn that power into money, thank god. Ex-presidents make a boatload of money, though. Books, speaking engagements, etc. That's a direct result of their power.
That's what I meant. Perhaps "On the brink of becoming..." would have been clearer.
Re: Cities and Ambition
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
What rules do they break in Berlin that are not broken elsewhere?
That's the wrong question. This is about culture, not tallying. Berlin is special because it's a chaotic city in a country of orderliness. I started writing a list, but it doesn't do it any justice. Just like listing 10 big companies won't circumscribe the feel of Silicon Valley, a list of goofiness won't peg Berlin. But hang out in Kreuzberg for a weekend and you'll get it. :-) Berlin is still living on the energy f…
Wouldn't breaking the rules, if it were truly that general, result in something more substantial than goofiness? And if it's just goofiness, perhaps a better way to put it would be "break the social conventions".
It might seem like I'm being contentious just for its own sake, but I'm not. It's precisely the thing that most irks me about Western Europe: the attitude of "don't break the rules". Europeans seem to like to break rules that are obsolete or largely inconsequential (e.g. about drugs and sexuality). And they're very proud of that. But the big and important rules, like those of business and broad social order, are universally accepted to the point where they are seen as morals.
Maybe it's different in Berlin?
Re: Cities and Ambition
#88Where is the art capital of the contemporary world? If Paris is where people appreciate art, and New York is where people buy art, is there a single city better than others where people go to make art?
Of cities I know, I think Paris might be the place to go to make it. Assuming what you want is to make good stuff rather than to create a brand, that is.
Re: Cities and Ambition
#89> This is one of the advantages of not having the universities in your country controlled by the government
Does pg really believe universities in the US aren't controlled by the government, or did he just mean their locations?
Re: Cities and Ambition
#90All of the city messages in the essay should be qualified with to the most ambitious people within that city or even more narrowly to this particular community of ambitious people. Put another way, within a given community of the most ambitions people in a given city, what is their metric for success?
I went to MIT for undergrad and grad, and then lived around there for several years thereafter. I do not think that Cambridge tells all its’ residents that they should be smarter. But it does send that message the average person within the MIT (and presumably Harvard, which I know less about) community.
My first company was in educational software and I interacted some with the Cambridge public school system. Some schools were pretty connected to the ambitious community, and others were almost completely separate. In other words, there are pockets of people, perhaps a majority, that are not in the ambitious community and do not perceive the ambitious community message. I would bet that in these pockets, there are sub-pockets, each with their own messages.
Now Cambridge is a weird place with an unusually concentrated group of the same type of people, and I agree that I haven’t at least found any place else like it. But it is just a pocket of Boston, albeit a bigger pocket than some of the other ambitious communities in other cities. And as Paul pointed out, Cambridge is not Boston. So he is really not talking about cities.
Again, he is talking about specific communities within cities. There are probably even other ambitious communities in Boston (in its financial district, for example), where the message is not you should be smarter, but something more along the lines of you should be richer. And I’m pretty sure there is another, separate, local politics community, where the message is more like the DC message described (on a smaller scale). (My wife worked in a state agency, and we have friends who were in the legal community there. I myself was the treasurer of a city council campaign.)
So, in sum, I agree there are messages within communities. But I wouldn’t generalize to entire cities. The reason I think people get confused is because particular types of these communities only exist in certain cities, and in sometimes just one. The messages Paul describes are in the communities he is more likely to happen upon given his network and interests, within those cities. Yet there are certainly other communities within those cities with other messages. These other communities, in the aggregate, probably account for the vast majority of people in a given city.