Something I really enjoy doing is reading biographies of successful people to find out how they did what they did, to find out the possibilities they have been given that brought them to success. An antithesis that often emerges is the life in big cities versus the life in small towns, both of them with pros and cons.
I have been living in a very small town for my whole life, therefore I might be biased, but at the same time, I now study in a relatively large city with about a million citizens and I travelled a lot, also abroad, then I kind of experienced both of them. Until I was a teenager in high school I never went to Turin alone or with my friends, I never went out there, I never really spent time in that city. Then, one day, my classmates organized a “trip” there with the bus and I still remember how fascinated I was by that. Lots of things to do, lots of things to visit, to experience, shops, museums, an amazing architecture, expositions, concerts and even more.
Now, just describing it like that, it seems I lived in the middle age and then I suddenly landed in the 21st century, but it’s not entirely true. Life in a smaller town is just different. I once read an article that children living in huge American metropolis like NY believe that the shape of the Findus is the actual shape of the codfish. Thanks God I didn’t grow up in NY then. There are advantages and disadvantages in both situations.
It is undoubtably true that a city can offer you more possibilities, but it’s up to you to chose whether to grab them or not, and which ones. Life in a city will surely gives you a broader mind set, an open mind, but then it’s you who have to decide how to use that, to make a good and fruitful use of it, otherwise it’s pointless. We also have to consider that emerging in a small town it’s much easier. I live in a town with 2000 people and since I travelled a bit thanks to Erasmus, I am known as “the traveller” in here. In Turin in would be perfectly normal and usual, so that’s why it would be more arduous to become someone, to shine.
To conclude, I believe that neither the town, nor the city is the “best option” to be successful in life.
It is really up to you to catch the possibilities life can give you and make a good use of them,
regardless of where you come from. Moreover, you can’t always decide where you will be living, it’s life that brings you there, what you have to do is picking the best of it, and then going out of your comfort zone to explore the outside-world. In this way, you can be somehow successful.