Link: https://paulgraham.com/cities.html
伟大城市通过其独特而微妙的“信息”，深刻影响着生活在其中的人们的抱负。他指出，不同城市传递着独特的价值观：纽约强调财富，剑桥推崇智慧，硅谷则看重影响力和权力。这种环境影响远超个人意志，能极大塑造甚至决定一个人的成就，例如历史上的佛罗伦萨与米兰的艺术发展差异。城市通过聚集志同道合的“同行”、提供“观众”以及无处不在的氛围（如通过窗户所见、无意中听到的对话），持续地鼓励或打击特定抱负。因此，Graham建议，尤其在职业生涯的早期和中期，抱负者应积极尝试居住在不同城市，以找到与自身志向产生共鸣的环境，从而最大化个人潜力的实现。
原文
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 aboutearlier: 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, although 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.
Notes
[1] This is one of the advantages of not having the universities in your country controlled by the government. When governments decide how to allocate resources, political deal-making causes things to be spread out geographically. No central goverment would put its two best universities in the same town, unless it was the capital (which would cause other problems). But scholars seem to like to cluster together as much as people in any other field, and when given the freedom to they derive the same advantages from it.
[2] There are still a few old professors in Palo Alto, but one by one they die and their houses are transformed by developers into McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev.
[3] How many times have you read about startup founders who continued to live inexpensively as their companies took off? Who continued to dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had in grad school, and so on? If you did that in New York, people would treat you like shit. If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco wearing a jeans and a t-shirt, they’re nice to you; who knows who you might be? Not in New York.
One sign of a city’s potential as a technology center is the number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. According to Zagat’s there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York, and 20 in Paris.
(Zagat’s lists the Ritz Carlton Dining Room in SF as requiring jackets but I couldn’t believe it, so I called to check and in fact they don’t. Apparently there’s only one restaurant left on the entire West Coast that still requires jackets: The French Laundry in Napa Valley.)
[4] Ideas are one step upstream from economic power, so it’s conceivable that intellectual centers like Cambridge will one day have an edge over Silicon Valley like the one the Valley has over New York.
This seems unlikely at the moment; if anything Boston is falling further and further behind. The only reason I even mention the possibility is that the path from ideas to startups has recently been getting smoother. It’s a lot easier now for a couple of hackers with no business experience to start a startup than it was 10 years ago. If you extrapolate another 20 years, maybe the balance of power will start to shift back. I wouldn’t bet on it, but I wouldn’t bet against it either.
[5] If Paris is where people care most about art, why is New York the center of gravity of the art business? Because in the twentieth century, art as brand split apart from art as stuff. New York is where the richest buyers are, but all they demand from art is brand, and since you can base brand on anything with a sufficiently identifiable style, you may as well use the local stuff.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, and David Sloo for reading drafts of this.
译文
大城市吸引有抱负的人。当你漫步其中时，就能感受到这一点。城市以数百种微妙的方式向你传递信息：你可以做得更多；你应该更努力。
令人惊讶的是，这些信息可能有多么不同。纽约首先告诉你：你应该赚更多的钱。当然，还有其他信息。你应该更时尚。你应该更好看。但最清晰的信息是，你应该更富有。
我喜欢波士顿（或者说剑桥）的原因是，那里的信息是：你应该更聪明。你真的应该开始阅读那些你一直想读的书了。
当你问一个城市传递什么信息时，有时会得到令人惊讶的答案。尽管硅谷的人们非常尊重智慧，但硅谷传递的信息是：你应该更有影响力。
这与纽约传递的信息不完全相同。权力在纽约当然也很重要，但纽约对十亿美元的财富印象深刻，即使你只是继承了它。在硅谷，除了少数房地产经纪人，没有人会在意。在硅谷，重要的是你对世界产生了多大的影响。人们关心拉里和谢尔盖，不是因为他们的财富，而是因为他们控制着谷歌，而谷歌几乎影响着每一个人。
一个城市传递什么信息有多重要？从经验来看，答案似乎是：非常重要。你可能认为，如果你有足够的意志力去做伟大的事情，你就能超越你的环境。你住在哪里最多只会产生百分之几的影响。但如果你看看历史证据，它似乎比这更重要。大多数做过伟大事情的人都聚集在当时做那种事情的几个地方。
你可以从我之前写过的一件事中看到城市的力量：米兰的达芬奇的例子。你听说过的几乎所有十五世纪意大利画家都来自佛罗伦萨，尽管米兰同样大。佛罗伦萨的人们在基因上没有不同，所以你必须假设米兰也出生了一个与达芬奇一样有天赋的人。他发生了什么？
如果连一个与达芬奇一样有天赋的人都无法战胜环境的力量，你认为你能吗？
我不认为。我相当固执，但我不会试图对抗这种力量。我宁愿利用它。所以我花了很多时间思考住在哪里。
我一直以为伯克利会是理想的地方——基本上就是天气好的剑桥。但几年前我最终尝试住在那里时，结果并非如此。伯克利传递的信息是：你应该生活得更好。伯克利的生活非常文明。它可能是美国最让北欧人感到宾至如归的地方。但它并没有充满抱负。
回想起来，一个如此宜人的地方会吸引那些最关心生活质量的人，这不应该令人惊讶。事实证明，天气好的剑桥并不是剑桥。你在剑桥遇到的人并非偶然。你必须做出牺牲才能住在那里。它昂贵且有些脏乱，而且天气通常很糟糕。所以你在剑桥遇到的人是那种即使这意味着住在昂贵、脏乱、天气恶劣的地方，也想住在最聪明的人身边的人。
截至本文撰写之时，剑桥似乎是世界的知识之都。我意识到这听起来像是一个荒谬的说法。之所以如此，是因为声称其他任何地方是知识之都都更加荒谬。从有抱负的学生的流动来看，美国大学目前似乎是最好的。那么哪个美国城市有更强的声称呢？纽约？那里有很多聪明人，但被数量更多的西装野蛮人稀释了。湾区也有很多聪明人，但同样被稀释了；那里有两所伟大学校，但它们相距遥远。哈佛和麻省理工学院按西海岸标准几乎是相邻的，它们周围还有大约20所其他学院和大学。
[1]
因此，剑桥感觉像一个以思想为主要产业的城镇，而纽约的产业是金融，硅谷的产业是初创公司。
当我们谈论城市时，我们实际上是在谈论人群的集合。长期以来，城市是唯一大型的人群集合，所以你可以互换使用这两个概念。但从我提到的例子中，我们可以看到事情正在发生多大的变化。纽约是一个经典的伟大城市。但剑桥只是一个城市的一部分，而硅谷甚至不是。 (圣何塞并非像它有时声称的那样是硅谷的首都。它只是硅谷一端的178平方英里。)
也许互联网会进一步改变事情。也许有一天，你所属的最重要的社区将是一个虚拟社区，而你实际住在哪里并不重要。但我不会打赌。物理世界带宽很高，而且城市向你发送信息的一些方式非常微妙。
每年春天回到剑桥，最令人兴奋的事情之一就是黄昏时分走在街上，你可以看到房子里面。当你晚上走在帕洛阿尔托时，你除了电视的蓝色光芒什么也看不到。在剑桥，你看到书架上摆满了看起来很有前途的书。帕洛阿尔托在1960年可能和剑桥很像，但现在你绝不会猜到附近有一所大学。现在它只是硅谷较富裕的社区之一。
[2]
一个城市主要通过偶然事件与你对话——通过你透过窗户看到的东西，通过你无意中听到的对话。这不是你需要刻意寻找的东西，而是你无法关闭的东西。住在剑桥的职业危害之一就是无意中听到那些在陈述句中使用疑问语调的人的对话。但总的来说，我宁愿听剑桥的对话，也不愿听纽约或硅谷的对话。
一位90年代末搬到硅谷的朋友说，住在那里最糟糕的事情是偷听的质量很低。当时我以为她是在故意搞怪。当然，偷听别人的谈话可能很有趣，但高质量的偷听真的那么重要，以至于会影响你选择住在哪里吗？现在我明白了她的意思。你无意中听到的谈话告诉你你身处何种人群之中。
无论你多么坚定，都很难不受到周围人的影响。与其说你做了城市期望你做的事情，不如说当周围没有人关心你所关心的事情时，你会感到沮丧。
鼓励和沮丧之间存在着一种不平衡，就像赚钱和赔钱之间一样。大多数人高估了负数金额：他们会更努力地避免损失一美元，而不是赚取一美元。同样，尽管有很多人足够坚强，能够抵制仅仅因为他们所在的地方应该做某事而去做某事，但很少有人足够坚强，能够继续做周围没有人关心的事情。
因为抱负在某种程度上是不相容的，而钦佩是一种零和游戏，所以每个城市都倾向于专注于一种抱负。剑桥之所以成为知识之都，不仅因为那里聚集了聪明人，还因为那里的人们没有其他更关心的事情。纽约和湾区的教授是二等公民——直到他们分别创办对冲基金或初创公司。
这为纽约人自泡沫经济以来一直困惑的一个问题提供了答案：纽约能否发展成为一个能与硅谷匹敌的创业中心。一个不太可能的原因是，在纽约创办初创公司的人会觉得自己是二等公民。
[3]纽约人已经有其他更欣赏的东西了。
从长远来看，这可能对纽约不利。一项重要的新技术的力量最终会转化为金钱。因此，纽约更关心金钱，而更不关心权力，这表明它认识到了同样的事情，但速度较慢。
[4]事实上，它在自己的游戏中一直输给硅谷：福布斯400富豪榜上纽约居民与加州居民的比例从1982年首次发布时的1.45（81:56）下降到2007年的0.83（73:88）。
并非所有城市都会传递信息。只有那些某种抱负的中心才会。而且，如果不生活在那里，很难确切地知道一个城市传递什么信息。我了解纽约、剑桥和硅谷的信息，因为我分别在这些地方生活了几年。华盛顿特区和洛杉矶似乎也传递信息，但我没有在任何一个地方待足够长的时间来确定它们是什么。
洛杉矶最重要的事情似乎是名声。有一个最受欢迎的人的A名单，最受人钦佩的是榜上有名，或者与榜上有名的人是朋友。除此之外，信息与纽约非常相似，尽管可能更强调外表吸引力。
在华盛顿特区，信息似乎是，最重要的是你认识谁。你想成为圈内人。实际上，这似乎与洛杉矶的情况非常相似。有一个A名单，你想榜上有名或与榜上有名的人亲近。唯一的区别是A名单是如何选择的。即使如此，也没有那么不同。
目前，旧金山的信息似乎与伯克利相同：你应该生活得更好。但如果足够多的初创公司选择旧金山而不是硅谷，这种情况就会改变。在泡沫时期，这是一个失败的预兆——一种自我放纵的选择，就像购买昂贵的办公家具一样。即使现在，当初创公司选择旧金山时，我仍然持怀疑态度。但如果足够多的优秀公司这样做，它就不再是自我放纵的选择，因为硅谷的重心将转移到那里。
我还没有找到像剑桥那样具有知识抱负的地方。牛津和剑桥（英国）感觉像伊萨卡或汉诺威：信息在那里，但不够强烈。
巴黎曾是一个伟大的知识中心。如果你在1300年去那里，它可能传递着剑桥现在传递的信息。但我去年在那里住了一段时间，居民的抱负并非知识性的。巴黎现在传递的信息是：做事要有风格。我实际上很喜欢这一点。巴黎是我住过的唯一一个人们真正关心艺术的城市。在美国，只有少数富人购买原创艺术品，即使是更老练的人也很少能超越通过艺术家的品牌来判断它。但黄昏时透过巴黎的窗户看，你会发现那里的人们确实关心画作的样子。从视觉上看，巴黎拥有我所知道的最好的偷听体验。
[5]
我还从城市中听到过一个信息：在伦敦，你仍然（勉强）能听到一个人应该更贵族化的信息。如果你仔细听，在巴黎、纽约和波士顿也能听到。但这个信息在各地都非常微弱。100年前它会很强烈，但现在如果我没有刻意调到那个波长去看看是否还有信号，我可能根本不会注意到它。
到目前为止，我从城市中收集到的信息完整列表是：财富、风格、时尚、外表吸引力、名声、政治权力、经济权力、智力、社会阶层和生活质量。
我对这份清单的第一反应是，它让我有点不安。我一直认为抱负是件好事，但现在我意识到那是因为我一直默认地将其理解为我在乎的领域的抱负。当你列出所有有抱负的人所抱负的东西时，它就不那么美好了。
仔细观察，我发现清单上有几件事在历史的背景下令人惊讶。例如，100年前不会有“外表吸引力”（尽管2400年前可能有）。它对女性一直很重要，但在20世纪后期，它似乎也开始对男性很重要。我不确定为什么——可能是女性权力增加、演员作为榜样的影响力增加，以及现在很多人在办公室工作等多种因素的结合：你不能通过穿太花哨的衣服在工厂里炫耀，所以你必须用身体来炫耀。
“时尚”是100年前你不会在榜单上看到的东西。或者你会吗？它的意思是知道什么是潮流。所以也许它只是取代了社会阶层中“通晓时事”的成分。这可以解释为什么时尚在伦敦似乎特别受人推崇：它是传统英国人对只有圈内人才能理解的晦涩代码的喜爱2.0版。
经济权力在100年前就会出现在榜单上，但我们对其的理解正在改变。它曾经意味着对大量人力和物质资源的控制。但它越来越意味着指导技术发展方向的能力，而一些能够做到这一点的人甚至不富有——例如，重要开源项目的领导者。过去的工业巨头拥有装满聪明人的实验室，为他们创造新技术。新一代人本身就是那些人。
随着这种力量受到更多关注，另一种力量正在从榜单上消失：社会阶层。我认为这两个变化是相关的。经济权力、财富和社会阶层只是同一事物在不同生命阶段的名称：经济权力转化为财富，财富转化为社会阶层。因此，人们的钦佩焦点正在向上游转移。
任何想做一番大事业的人都必须住在大城市吗？不；所有大城市都会激发某种抱负，但它们并非唯一能做到这一点的地方。对于某些类型的工作，你只需要少数有才华的同事。
城市提供的是观众和同行筛选机制。这在数学或物理等领域并不那么关键，因为除了同行之外，没有其他观众重要，而且判断能力足够直接，招聘和招生委员会可以可靠地做到这一点。在数学或物理等领域，你所需要的只是一个拥有合适同事的系。它可以在任何地方——例如，在新墨西哥州的洛斯阿拉莫斯。
在艺术、写作或技术等领域，更大的环境才重要。在这些领域，最优秀的从业者并非方便地聚集在少数顶尖大学院系和研究实验室中——部分原因是人才更难判断，部分原因是人们为这些东西付费，所以不需要依靠教学或研究经费来养活自己。正是在这些更混乱的领域，身处大城市最有帮助：你需要感受到周围的人关心你所做的工作的鼓励，而且由于你必须自己寻找同行，你需要大城市更大的吸纳机制。
你不必一辈子都住在大城市才能从中受益。关键的几年似乎是职业生涯的早期和中期。显然，你不必在大城市长大。在大学里是否在大城市似乎也不重要。对大多数大学生来说，一个几千人的世界已经足够大了。此外，在大学里，你还不需要面对最困难的工作——发现新的问题来解决。
当你进入下一个更困难的阶段时，在一个可以找到同行和鼓励的地方最有帮助。一旦你找到了两者，如果你愿意，你似乎就可以离开了。印象派画家展示了典型的模式：他们出生在法国各地（毕沙罗出生在加勒比海），也死在法国各地，但定义他们的是他们在巴黎共同度过的岁月。
除非你确定自己想做什么以及其主要中心在哪里，否则你最好的选择可能是在年轻时尝试住在几个地方。你永远无法知道一个城市传递什么信息，直到你住在那里，甚至不知道它是否仍然传递信息。通常你的信息会是错误的：我25岁时曾尝试住在佛罗伦萨，以为那会是一个艺术中心，但结果我晚了450年。
即使一个城市仍然是充满抱负的活跃中心，你也不会确定它的信息是否会与你产生共鸣，直到你听到它。当我搬到纽约时，我一开始非常兴奋。那是一个令人兴奋的地方。所以花了我相当长的时间才意识到我只是不像那里的人。我一直在寻找纽约的剑桥。结果它在很远很远的上城：坐飞机一个小时的上城。
有些人16岁就知道自己要做什么样的工作，但在大多数有抱负的孩子身上，抱负似乎先于任何具体的抱负。他们知道自己想做一番大事业。他们只是还没有决定是成为摇滚明星还是脑外科医生。这没什么不对。但这意味如果你有这种最常见的抱负，你可能不得不通过反复试验来决定住在哪里。你可能不得不找到一个让你感到宾至如归的城市，才能知道自己有什么样的抱负。
注释
[1] 这是你的国家大学不受政府控制的优势之一。当政府决定如何分配资源时，政治交易会导致资源在地理上分散。没有哪个中央政府会把它的两所最好的大学放在同一个城镇，除非那是首都（这会引起其他问题）。但学者们似乎像其他任何领域的人一样喜欢聚集在一起，当他们获得自由时，他们从中获得了同样的优势。
[2] 帕洛阿尔托仍然有一些老教授，但他们一个接一个地去世，他们的房子被开发商改造成豪宅，卖给了业务发展副总裁。
[3] 你读过多少次关于创业公司创始人即使公司起飞后仍然过着节俭生活的故事？他们仍然穿着牛仔裤和T恤，开着研究生时期的旧车，等等？如果你在纽约这样做，人们会把你当成垃圾。如果你穿着牛仔裤和T恤走进旧金山的一家高档餐厅，他们会对你很好；谁知道你可能是谁？在纽约可不是这样。
一个城市作为技术中心的潜力标志之一是仍然要求男士穿夹克的餐厅数量。根据Zagat’s的数据，旧金山、洛杉矶、波士顿或西雅图没有，华盛顿特区有4家，芝加哥有6家，伦敦有8家，纽约有13家，巴黎有20家。
（Zagat’s将旧金山的丽思卡尔顿餐厅列为要求穿夹克，但我不敢相信，所以我打电话核实，实际上他们不要求。显然，整个西海岸只剩下一家餐厅仍然要求穿夹克：纳帕谷的法国洗衣店。）
[4] 思想比经济权力领先一步，因此像剑桥这样的知识中心有一天可能会像硅谷对纽约那样，对硅谷拥有优势。
目前这似乎不太可能；如果说有什么的话，波士顿正在越来越落后。我之所以提到这种可能性，唯一的原因是，从思想走向初创公司的道路最近变得越来越顺畅。现在，两个没有商业经验的黑客创办一家初创公司比10年前容易得多。如果再推断20年，也许权力平衡会开始逆转。我不会打赌，但我也不会反对。
[5] 如果巴黎是人们最关心艺术的地方，为什么纽约是艺术商业的重心？因为在20世纪，作为品牌的艺术与作为实物的艺术分开了。纽约是富有的买家所在的地方，但他们对艺术的要求只是品牌，既然你可以基于任何具有足够可识别风格的东西来建立品牌，那么你也可以使用当地的东西。
感谢 Trevor Blackwell、Sarah Harlin、Jessica Livingston、Jackie McDonough、Robert Morris 和 David Sloo 阅读了本文的草稿。