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You Really Want to Achieve Your Dreams? Stop Loving Your City.
I used to love my city. After growing up in Nebraska, living in San Francisco was surreal. I felt like a character in a movie to be so lucky as to live there.
But I eventually realized the danger of loving my city. Loving my city was holding me back.
The same phenomenon I was suffering from, I later observed in other cities. It was that loving your city can make you delusional.
The phenomenon is called “basking in reflected glory,” and it’s what makes loving your city dangerous. When you bask in reflected glory—otherwise known as BIRGing—the accomplishments of others make you feel as if you yourself have accomplished something.
I noticed something one day as I was proclaiming how happy I was to be living in “the greatest city in the world.” It was that a large portion of that feeling was coming from pride for what other people were doing in that city.
When I searched my own accomplishments for the source of that pride, I found nothing.
The dangerous thing was, that false sense of accomplishment was making me complacent. I didn’t want to go through life fooling myself into thinking I had done something, when I was only feeling pride for something other people had done. I didn’t want a sense of accomplishment to…
