San Francisco

I've noticed the, unfortunately implicit, problem that most people end up facing when visiting or moving to San Francisco is that being an "exceptional" person is turned into a status game, when the case should be that having the desire to do exceptional things, instead of being "exceptional", should be done on one's own accord on their own definition of what that means to them

But ultimately doing exceptional things doesn't matter, it's really only emergent from doing what actually matters. A deep desire for $X$ can align with doing exceptional things, but it's not a guarantee when the focus is on $X$ itself.

I'd argue a person who's both the happiest and best in the world at what they do is someone who never even intended to be the best at what they do, but rather someone who found something they really care to work on that they have no choice other than doing so, as that's the thing they can't stop thinking about.

In most cases, meaning aside from individual people pushing others in the wrong direction, the status game is an emergent property of being around so many great people.

I think San Francisco is the best place to meet people who are working on interesting things, but it's a huge bubble.

It doesn't matter how much money you raised, whether you dropped out or didn't, or how many users you have.

Potential is more easily signaled but that isn't a good guiding principle, because it's emergent from a deeper set of axiomatic principles.

What matters is finding genuine & sincere devotion, and not a bunch of nonsense opinions on what others think will get you there, aside from borrowed perspectives.

Being around such a high concentration of talent is attractive, but it’s completely useless unless you know that’s the game you want to play for the contents within it, once you’ve gotten the perspective you needed from being there.

Perspectives only really matter when you have a hypothesis, of any kind whether it's small or large, for the type of work you want to do. If you don't have one, you're not going to find the truth to get to it, because there's nothing to converge towards.

Moving away from attempting to provide general thoughts that might apply to a larger subset of people, if I take a look at things from a purely utilitarian perspective with respect to impact, I'd argue that San Francisco isn't the best place to be on the long term, until certain criteria have been met over the span of multiple years.

But, this is dependent on how you view the pipeline of progress for humanity to be structured.

And it isn't the only thing that matters.