A few years ago, my classmates in Beijing had a metaphor: The big city is a vampire.
It's easy to suck out the best years of your youth and energy. In the daytime, you eat pancakes, squeeze the subway + transfer buses to crawl to work. At night, you rent a 10-square-meter bedroom and calculate your expenses for the month, lamenting the fact that you can't save much money at the end of the year.
Every time I walk across the footbridge from work, I feel like the city's glitter and glamour has nothing to do with me.
"I can't afford to buy a house at all." When she occasionally talks about her future plans, she always ends with these words with mixed feelings.
There is no escaping the "law of the real".
A few years later, she settled down in Beijing, got married, bought a house, and is now a happy, if not successful, woman.
The process is to say that it is difficult, in the big city to climb the ladder, there is no easy way, right? The first thing you need to do is to get a good deal of money to pay for the services you need, and then you have to pay for the services you need.
The most important thing that the students have learned is that when you choose a city, you are laying the groundwork for your own life.
There is a hot topic on a certain hu:
"Why do so many people prefer to make 5,000 or 6,000 a month, commute to and from work, squeeze the subway, and remove the miscellany not to have a few dollars left over, but also want to stay in the big city to live?"
Nearly 20 million readers are proof enough that it is a bolded question mark in the minds of countless people.
In fact, the most important reason is no more than two points.
First, the possibilities.
The cost of first and second tier cities is certainly high, but it is imaginative enough, especially in mega-cities such as North, South, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, which have the best resources and opportunities. The more ordinary people are, the more they need to look for opportunities in big cities.
Charlie Munger believes that there is an important principle in investing: choose to fish where the fish are plentiful.
The same with a salary of 5, 6 thousand, in the big city: for one thing, you are exposed to a different surface of information, ability to progress at a different rate, the rate of rise in income is naturally different; secondly, you come into contact with all kinds of people and choices, invariably, the idea has become more three-dimensional.
One of my readers, half a year after his graduation, got an offer through a web interview, and dragged his suitcase alone to join a small IT company in Shanghai. He started with less than 10 people in the whole company, taking more than 5,000 monthly salary, to the company's development to more than 30 people, he was promoted to technical director; and then to more than 50 people, became the CTO, annual salary plus dividends of nearly 600,000 yuan.
Before and after less than 5 years.
Every time he goes back home, although he feels close, but even more so, a day in the big city in a flash, while the small city of decades, as if everything has not changed.
To be clear, change means opportunity, and the higher the density of change, the more hidden your future possibilities.
Second, the city's development dividend.
Nothing is more typical than real estate.
Yes, it's true that houses in big cities are a deterrent for many people, but it also happens to be an important channel for ordinary people to jump on the wealth express.
My friend in Shenzhen, who bought a house in 2011 for more than 30,000 yuan, has now risen to more than 80,000 yuan. Housing prices, can be said to be a city's stock, catching up with the golden age of urban development, really is to embark on the fast track to wealth.
The house price in big cities is a filter.
It filters out the hardworking, smart and risk-taking people by screening and filtering them out in one word: expensive.
Luo Zhenyu said, the growth of talent is most effective in no more than 3 ways:
1, go to the big city;
2, go to the place where the bulls are piled up;
3, go to the company with the strongest business atmosphere.
"All growth comes from standing in the right place." Big cities, no doubt, are natural environments for growth.
People want to get better and better, or to toss on the uphill road, the current pressure will be exchanged for more space later; people want to get worse and worse, then take the downhill road, feel free to lie down to the easy and comfortable place, to avoid all the things that make people uncomfortable.
The world is fair; what you do today, bit by bit, determines what your life will look like in five years.
You will probably say that you can live well in a small city and earn a good income, and that you can be happy even if your life is dull.
I'm not saying that life in a small city is bad.
Young people, in particular, can find countless possibilities in life in the big city, rather than the familiar ones they once had in their heads.
Each choice doesn't stand alone, but is nested in layers that add up to what your future will look like.
A former colleague of mine, who used to do equipment maintenance in a business unit in an 18th-tier county, taught himself network engineering and database after work, quit his job and went to Fuzhou to work as an IT operation and maintenance engineer, and then jumped to a listed Internet company in Hangzhou two years later, where he has bought a house and settled down now.
What he feels y is that every choice is closely related to the environment you are in, the people you come into contact with, and the things you encounter.
Previously, my colleague felt that his county small business unit, more than 4,000 dollars is very good, the family bought him a good house and car, living in clothes and food.
Colleagues in the unit are happy, every day parents. He wouldn't have run off to teach himself to be a netizen if he hadn't been too idle. I never thought that one day I would completely switch the workplace runway and settle in Hangzhou.
The city you live in and the circle you live in is almost your social circle.
It determines what kind of people you'll become coworkers with, what kind of people you'll fall in love with, who you'll marry, and what kind of life you'll lead.
It's a path dependency.
People have inertia, and once they enter a certain path, the probability is that they will become dependent on that path; once people have made a certain choice, the force of inertia will make that choice self-reinforcing and make it easy for you to go out.
It's easy to get caught up in it without realizing it, to make decisions based on inertia, and to conclude that this is my destiny.
One can never desire what one has not experienced, and one can never make decisions outside one's own vision.
Of course, I'm not saying that if you're making 5 or 6 thousand dollars in salary, you have to always grit your teeth and hang on for dear life in the big city.
While it's encouraging to try and make a go of it, you need to keep in mind that it's time to stop.
First, give yourself a deadline.
Many friends from college to work, unknowingly in the big city for many years.
Saying that it is not good to mix, certainly not a problem to get enough food; saying that it is good to mix, salary and career has been early to the ceiling, so the stalemate, looking at more and more out of reach of the housing prices, the dilemma.
There are also some friends who have worked for 3-5 years, have a certain understanding of themselves, and have a relatively clear understanding of their jobs, and choose to go back to the small city.
What I'm trying to say is that there is a window of time in big cities.
The reason many people are reluctant to leave the big city is not because they think it's so great, but because they've been there too long, and if they go back, there's always a bit of reluctance.
Why give yourself deadline?
The life of a person is long,? Spend a few years to fight lack of good, if the stop loss, lost just a few years; if not stop loss, lost more than a few years.
So, suggest giving yourself a goal and a deadline. If you can reach it, stay on, if you can't, change course.
Secondly, expect something from a small city.
Many people feel that returning to their hometowns is a step away from the hustle and bustle of the first and second tier.
But to be honest, young people in small cities tend to be more anxious these days.
The popularity of the Internet has erased the information gap, and we see things through the Internet that would otherwise be hard to access, magnifying desire.
My colleague who is an IT operation and maintenance engineer, why did he quit his job in the county to look for a job in a provincial capital? It is because in the online forums and communities, to see their peers today sun internal training tomorrow sun overtime, the day after the weekend to participate in what the offline open class, think it is very interesting, want to experience a life.
There are many articles on the internet such as "Monthly salary of X million, still can't afford to buy a house" and "Annual salary of X million, he only used X years", which seem to be an anxiety factor for many people fleeing from the big cities, so they look forward to the calmness that a small city can bring.
But as Karen Horne says in her book The Conflict Within Us:
The false peace caused by inner sluggishness is not at all to be envied; it only makes us weaker, and more and more difficult to cope with changes in the outside world.
The problems that can't be solved in the big city may not be solved back in the small city either.
Big city or small city, there is no absolute good or bad.
It's just that everyone along the way has to gradually understand what they want and work hard for it.
Some people have a thousand sails, in the small city, using their own wisdom, living the ideal day; some people even if they are stretched to the limit, but the great desire to grow so that he is in the big city pain and happiness, such as the Takeshi Kitano this sentence: "Although hard, I would still choose that kind of rolling life".
This is perhaps the most valuable meaning of choosing a city for us.
So why do many people earn 5 or 6 thousand a month and stay in the big city to live?
Because people love the big city, not the city itself, but like in the big city, that become different themselves.