You are made by your surroundings

October 13, 2026

I was reading about Florence and one thing kept coming back: wherever you grow up, you get influenced by it.

I think Florence is interesting because they had incredible artists in the span of 200 years, and they were a relatively small city. Then, by chance, I read a book about the Duomo and found a very similar pattern.1

This is super interesting: they designed the Duomo without knowing how to build it! So it stayed open at the top for decades.2 I mean, if I was a kid walking around there, I would certainly think about why this thing is open, and why it’s designed like that. It would stimulate you for sure.

Likewise, Florence often held competitions for different designs and buildings. How cool is that, a public competition to design your church, mosque or library. If that was the case today, that would certainly make some more people interested in architecture and design. Think about going to a Mall and you see designs for the Duomo. That would certainly get attention.

Now you see the same in Steve Jobs. He grew up in Mountain View. Once a neighbor who worked at HP put a carbon microphone, a battery and a speaker out on his driveway for the local kids. Jobs played with it, and later went home and told his father he was wrong about how amplification worked. A kid who sees engineers every day gets excited about what engineers do. That’s just normall stuff.

There’s research behind this. A team of economists looked at who becomes an inventor in America. Growing up near people who patent in a certain field makes you more likely to patent in that same field.

There is also research on Nobel laureates, and it shows an apprenticeship relationship there too. Of the 92 American laureates who did their prize-winning work in the US by 1972, 48 had trained or worked under older laureates.3 But in the end, who you are around matters quite a bit, from childhood to mid-career.

Steve Jobs wasn’t the only kid in Silicon Valley, but if you grew up there, you were simply more aware of technology and how cool it is. Today the internet solves this to a certain extent. But if you live in a place where, after you leave Twitter, the only interesting conversation is football, politics and food, then you are much less likely to get excited about AI or about building the Duomo in Florence.

You could change this, but it requires incredible agency: pushing yourself out of an environment where you do not belong, into one where you do. People can choose their environment, and some do. This is also why I believe the US stays competitive. It constantly attracts people who want to be in that environment. Otherwise, going to Europe would have been easier for many immigrants for a very long time.

In the end, wherever you grow up shapes what you get excited about. I am still excited about football no matter what how many years it has been since I left Turkey. But in more important aspects, if you care about Art, let’s say, you should likely in a place that already thinks about art or reminds you art when you walk in the street. That’s how Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo all came out of the same small city.

Footnotes

  1. Ross King, Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture (2000). ↩

  2. The cathedral was founded in 1296 and its dome was never completed; the competition for the dome was held in 1418, and construction began in 1420. See Florence Cathedral and How linear perspective made Florence’s famed dome possible. The 1401 competition for the baptistery doors was won by Ghiberti. ↩

  3. Harriet Zuckerman, Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States (1977). ↩

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