# Moving to the big city

**Published by:** [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com/)
**Published on:** 2016-03-31
**Categories:** architect-this-city, atc, athiscity, big-cities, blackberry, cities, city-of-waterloo, citylab, economic-development, research-in-motion, richard-florida, rim, self-confidence, tech, toronto, uncategorized, university-of-toronto, university-of-waterloo, waterloo, wilfrid-laurier-university
**URL:** https://brandondonnelly.com/moving-to-the-big-city

## Content

When I was 18 years old, I moved from the suburbs of Toronto to Waterloo, Ontario, which is about an hour west of the city. I largely did this for two reasons. Firstly, I had started visiting friends at both Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo while I was in high school, and I thought that I wanted that kind of University town experience. Secondly, I started University as a Computer Science student and I figured that Waterloo was a pretty good place to study that. Research In Motion (later renamed to Blackberry) was an important company at the time and interesting things were happening. Though to be clear, I was a student at Laurier and not at the University of Waterloo – the better of the two schools for Computer Science – because I didn’t have the grades for the latter. But a funny thing ended up happening. I hated living in Waterloo. I felt so out of place. So much so that I spent every weekend back in Toronto visiting my friends who had instead decided to go to the University of Toronto. And I remember vividly how I felt during those weekends. I would stand in my friend’s apartments – most of which had dens and solariums that were hacked into bedrooms so that they could afford to live there – and I would look across the skyline and think to myself: why the hell do I not live here? So I transferred to the University of Toronto. And that solved that. The reason I bring up this story today is that I was reminded of it while reading a recent CityLab article by Richard Florida called, The Self-Confident City. The three main arguments in the article are: (1) Where we choose to live has a massive impact on our life outcomes. (2) Self-confident people – according to a recent study – seem to be drawn to big cities. (3) Self-confidence can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy for people in big cities. Now, I don’t know if it was really self-confidence and youthful hubris that told me I needed to live in a bigger city than Waterloo. (It was probably part of it.) All I know is that I wanted to live in a super dynamic place that felt bigger than me. I wanted to feel like I was a small fish in a big pond trying to make some sort of meaningful dent. That was true for me when I was 18. And it remains true for me today at 32.

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