One of my favorite topics of all time is a discussion around cities. What cities do you love and what do you get when you go to individual cities?*
This Paul Graham essay is a great conversation starter on this.
He asks the question:
What does a city whisper to you?
After traveling for 2 1/2 years, I had a list of some of my favorite cities – but I became caught up looking for the perfect one. I’ve got a lot of places with memories and it was hard to decide a favorite.
New York, San Diego, Chicago, Barcelona, Austin. The list goes on.
And while I loved them all, they all had their own issues:
- New York is crazy expensive
- San Diego is too laid back.
- Chicago is cold AF in the winter.
- Austin is hot AF in the summer.
- Barcelona doesn’t have a great business environment.
So instead of making a decision, I just kept traveling – tasting one city at a time. And it was fun.
But at some point it had diminishing returns. This isn’t another blog post on paralysis analysis (it’s a bit overdone in my opinion), but for me – the benefits of having one location to operate out of was almost more appealing than what specific location it was.
I joked at some point that I could move to Arkansas and it wouldn’t’ matter – because I just needed to be in one place.
So I moved to Austin. And I like it, but I don’t love it. There’s lots of things I would change, but the fact that it’s central, inexpensive, interesting, and a hub for several other interesting entrepreneurial friends – made it “good enough” for me to pull the trigger.
And in the past 3 months since moving, I’ve probably gotten more work done than in the previous 6-12 months I did while traveling.
In a lot of ways, it was less about Austin and more about just pulling the trigger – wherever that was.
And instead of focusing on all the things that aren’t perfect about Austin – I’m trying to focus on what’s great about it.
Which made me think…
- People like to say you need to have it all.
- People like to say you need to wait for things to be perfect.
- People like to say that you need to hold out for something great.
Maybe they’re wrong.
Maybe you just need to find something that’s good enough.
Then it’s on you to decide to put in the work to make it great.
*This post is about cities, but it’s not just about cities.
Leave a Reply