The Geography of Ambition
This essay is about moving to a city.
Most of my close friends know that I recently moved to London. Telling them the news usually gets one of two reactions:
- “Oh, that’s cool. Good luck.”
- “Why would you ever want to do that? It’s too expensive. Too crowded.”
During university, I took a course in Geographic Data Science where one assignment was to make choropleth maps of the UK based on different socio-economic variables. London was an outlier for almost everything, so much so that we had to adjust the scales to stop it from skewing national averages. The variable that stood out most to me? Median household income.
There’s this idea that the strongest predictor of an individual’s future net worth is their postcode. It’s not a perfect rule, but it’s a useful heuristic. Where you live probably matters. Maybe more than we like to admit.
Cities and Ambition
Let me backtrack. There’s a well-known essay by Paul Graham (the guy who started Y Combinator, a startup accelerator in Silicon Valley) called Cities and Ambition. He argues that every city sends an unspoken message about what it values.
- New York tells you to get rich.
- Los Angeles tells you to get famous.
- Paris tells you to be stylish.
Ambition, it turns out, clusters geographically.
So what about London? What does it value?
It’s not helpful to think of a city as one monolith. Instead, there are micro-ecosystems:
- Finance lives in ‘the City’.
- Law firms are in Holborn.
- Media is in Soho.
- Tech companies are in Shoreditch. (That area near Old Street is actually called Silicon Roundabout. It’s a terrible name, by the way.)
Most people in London’s startup scene would tell you they’d rather be in San Francisco. That’s where the investors are and where valuations are highest. But for now, London is the best place to be in Europe. So I moved as close to Shoreditch as I could afford, which ended up being Whitechapel.
Being Dream Adjacent
Part of that decision was inspired by Quentin Tarantino, my favourite director, who once spoke on Joe Rogan’s podcast about hitting 25 and realising he’d spent years working a “dream-adjacent” job at a video store. He loved talking about movies, but he wasn’t making them. So he moved as close to Hollywood as he could (Koreatown) and that proximity put him within filmmaking’s ‘orbit’. The move didn’t make him a director overnight, but it made the dream tangible.
His segment at the 40 minute mark is one of the greatest bits of any podcast I have ever listened to in my life.
The Network Effect
There’s a concept called the network effect. It’s the idea that value increases with the number of participants. Cities work the same way. The more ambitious people you’re surrounded by, the more likely you are to encounter ideas, introductions, or coincidences that change your trajectory.
Having now made the move to London, I’m deeply motivated by the agency of the people around me. They move with a kind of confident optimism. A productive delusion that things will work out. I like to think I’m driven too, but the message from these people is clear: work harder.
The Reality
Of course, moving to a big city, or another country entirely, comes with assumptions and privilege. Visas, family obligations, and finances are very real barriers.
So here’s the more general point: everywhere, in every country, has some place where ambitious people congregate. Find that place. Join them.
Most people that read my essays are friends and people I’ve met along the way in life. They are roughly my age (in their twenties), with relatively few responsibilities. This essay is targeted towards a very specific subsection of that group.
It’s probably not enough to just move somewhere and hope things click. Success is built on a thousand small things: long nights, deep work, endless rejections. It’s not really enough to be near the game. You have to actually play with the intention to win.
Still, of all the hard things on that list, moving and changing your environment might be the easiest to start with.