It’s commonly said of New York City that “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” I don’t think this is broadly true, actually.
There exist three types of cities in the US:
- Regional hubs
- Industry-specific national hubs
- NYC
The first category is made up of cities like Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, etc etc, and smaller cities. You move there if you’re from the surrounding area and you want a Big City Experience™. Generally, you reach the age of 30, move to the suburbs, have kids, and repeat. There isn’t much more to be said about such cities.
The second category is composed of cities where the best people in a particular industry from around the country/world tend to congregate there. Examples include San Francisco (tech industry), LA (film industry), Washington DC (political industry), and maybe Miami (stripping and dealing coke.) These cities tend to have weird properties where people move there to strike it rich/famous and then move away later, whether because they got what they wanted or they couldn’t hack it. Those who stay tend to be the successful ones, creating a weird status bifurcation in the city.
NYC is…sort of both? In a sense, it’s the regional hub for the US/world and a kind of a pan-industry semi-magnet insofar as you can find reasonably sophisticated people in any industry there (despite the industry’s primary power brokers being located elsewhere.) The exception to this is the finance industry, of course, which is very much anchored in NYC and sort of sets the tone for everyone who lives there.
If you’re in a field other than finance, though, chances are NYC isn’t the place where people who are really serious about your field go. If you’re really serious about acting, you go to LA. If you’re really serious about tech, you go to SF. And if you’re really serious about politics, you go to DC.
You’ll be able to meet serious players from any field in NYC, but you’ll probably miss out on much of the industry-wide emergent properties that arise chiefly (exclusively?) in its primary national hub. In tech, at least, this leads to these weird dynamics where you can “make it” within the NYC bubble of people who LARP as SF tech people but be completely unknown in the arenas where it really matters. My guess is there are analogous phenomena in the fields of film, politics, and science, but I don’t know for sure.
NYC also sends you messages that are counterproductive to your success in any field other than finance. As Paul Graham has noted, NYC strongly tells you every day that you need to have money and you need to have and spend it now. The industry national hub cities, on the other hand, are perfectly fine with you having potential and/or connections, because both of those are easily convertible into money in the future (which you can spend in NYC if you so choose.)
As a result, it’s probably only useful to live in NYC in your 20s if you’re a peon at Goldman Sachs who aspires to be a not-a-peon at Goldman Sachs. Otherwise, you’ll probably build your career on a firmer foundation if you live elsewhere.