San Francisco is competitive. Cities are competitive. Yet more and more people are choosing to live in them. And I see why. I’m based in downtown in SF. It’s like living in a heartbeat and feeling it pulse against my walls and through my windows in a way that brings energy from the outside in. An energy that reminds me of boundless human potential, observes it being actualized right outside my door. One that pushes me to reach it myself. It sounds exciting, uplifting. Mostly it is. It’s what’s kept me here for over three years. Three years of accelerated growth that could only come from external push combined with internal drive. But I wonder what the threshold is. How strong can that external push be before it becomes a shove. Becomes a hit to the other side of self-actualization, the yin to motivation and productivity’s yang — to mental state. The ‘suffering lies in desire’ mantra that my Buddhist and stoicism books continuously remind me. I’ve learned that and have improved with internalizing it, but I wonder if I’d still be where I am today if I operated from that perspective from the beginning of these three years.
After first moving here, I felt the wave of unparalleled standards and pervasive overachieving wash over me with each new person I met, event I attended, project I worked on. I realized that I’d either step up to meet them or get pushed out like many others that couldn’t join the game and couldn’t afford the rent to allow a few more months of trying. A bit of a sink or swim situation, veiled with a soft fuzzy California filter that’s deceivingly calming and inviting. You come here and feel the sun, see smiling faces, join local meetups and engage in small talk with Blue Bottle baristas and feel welcomed into a new home. It’s part of why people love here, fight to stay here. Why the competition thrives and pulses like a heartbeat you feel in bones and fire under feet that gets you up early and keeps you at your computer in hipster cafes on the weekends. I wouldn’t be where I am now without the three years living in this. Three years of interacting with people that are changing the world and technology that the rest of the population doesn’t believe is possible. A poster child of Dale Carnegie’s you’re the average of the people you spend your time with, I look back to my east coast self like a disconnected observer looking through one-sided glass to someone I don’t know. That person feels so distant from who I am now that I’ve delineated my perception of identity to two buckets, before SF and after SF.
I remember the first year of incessant productivity that accepted nothing less. Of picking time commitments based on how much growth potential they offered. Incessant productivity that felt a pulling resistance against any mindless act. That replaced Netflix with books and music with podcasts. I grinded because of the gap I felt between current state and the new standards driven by myself and the people around me. I closed that quicker than expected but all it did was raise those standards. Raised the bar to a new higher level that my effort and output curves had to meet. I started meeting more impressive people by my standards of wealth, career impact, and intellect. Previous idols have become friends, mentors, colleagues. It's concentrated the 700,000 influencers to a smaller group that’s been a new source of inspiration and standards-setting.
This has been the year I’ve stopped to ask, to what end? How much of this helps before it hurts? An Uber driver once said to me that the average timeline for SF transients is 3 years. It was hard to imagine that during the honeymoon stages of my SF love affair, but now I’m almost at 3.5 and it’s starting to make sense. The itch has grown to get out of the bubble for a bit and see how thick of a lens this city has shaded over my eyes. To discover how much my thinking and actions are influenced by living here. I once heard SF explained as the most similarly different thinking city in the world. People here think differently than the rest of the world, but in the same ways. I don’t doubt that there’s some truth to that, the best way to test it is see what happens when I leave it for a while. We’re habitual, comparing creatures. It’s difficult to know the extent of an environment’s effect until dropping yourself into a new one. I’m leaving for LA in a week, I’ll be living there for a little over a month then doing some traveling in South America and Europe then Burning Man. Two months of different. We’ll see if the lens exists, and if so, what remains when it lifts.