You Self Select When You come to America: A Harder life Equates to Greater Opportunities
When you immigrate somewhere outside your home country you are making a decision about the kind of life you want to live. You are trading off lifestyle versus opportunity. The opportunity for a new start and a new you.
As Louis L’amour’s “Flint” speaking about the Wild West frontier said:
“All Western Men Are from somewhere else when it comes to that. At the stage station in Alamitos I heard Swedish, German and Irish accents in just a few minutes, but I believe a Western man is a matter of psychology. The mere fact that a man chooses to come West indicates a difference of temperament or attitude, and then there’s bound to be changes due to the landscapes and the conditions.
I suppose the basic difference is that men want to survive, to mate, and to have security….and out here the other conditions are outweighed by the necessity to survive.”
I cannot think of a better description of America than that.
This is what I specifically am looking for when I meet startup founders from Europe and Canada. People willing to leave their home countries to come to America and compete. They are leaving places that are truly wonderful places to live. In all of my travels I notice the deep contrast of the much better quality of life in these places compared to the USA.
I’m not saying the USA is awful. It’s not but it is a much bigger, much more competitive and harder place to live. In fact, I’d say it’s ferociously competitive.
People around the world say that America has no culture. I would strongly disagree with this view: America does have a culture, a culture of aspiration & ambition.
It’s also a tough place that exemplifies the term “Extremistan” where the outcomes are very extreme. You end up being super successful or end up on the street.
“Many people have doubled (or lost all of) their net worth in a single moment: a company goes public or announces bankruptcy. A stock quintuples or crashes.
Vast man-made empires have been toppled by a single event—the storming of the Bastille, the signing of The Declaration of Independence. These individual events are what change looks like in Extremistan.
Sudden, violent, irreversible. Most of all, unforeseen.
As technology continues to evolve, we are, increasingly, living our lives in Extremistan. As more and more of the world around us goes from biological to man made, the degree to which our reality is defined by Extremistan is increasing.
In Extremistan, risk doesn’t live in the past; it lives in the future.”
Source: https://taylorpearson.me/extremistan/amp/
You self select when you choose to come to America. I see this in Silicon Valley. If you want to be the best, you have to be around and compete with the best. You discover what is the global maximum. Until that changes, America will still be the best place for business on the planet.