217. How to Leave New York: Demir & Carey Bentley of Lifehack Bootcamp

<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/demirandcarey/">Demir and Carey Bentley</a> are co-founders of <a href= "https://lifehackbootcamp.com/">Lifehack Bootcamp</a>, where they help professionals make more of their time and energy, to get more results. They once found themselves getting sucked into the prevailing values of the place they lived.</p> <p>The place you choose to live can have an outsized influence on how you choose to live. If where you live is a bad influence on you, you’ll do things that aren’t good for you. If where you live is a good influence on you, you’ll do things that are good for you.</p> <p>The place you live can influence you through cost of living, through weather, through how you get around – even through through culture. If people in a place value one thing, it can make it hard for you to value another thing.</p> <h3 id="todesignyourlifestartwithyoursurroundings">To design your life, start with your surroundings</h3> <p>If you’re going to <a href= "https://kadavy.net/blog/archive/love-your-work/">love your work</a>, you need to design your surroundings so you can pursue your values. One way to do that is by choosing the right place to live.</p> <p>The influence of place has long been an interesting topic for me because I’ve long felt like I was born in the wrong place. It wasn’t until after college – after I had traveled a small amount – that this feeling really hit me.</p> <p>“Nebraska” for many people is synonymous with “the middle of nowhere.” For me, until then, it was simply where I lived. As I struggled to find work after college and to set up a life somewhere, that was when I really started to feel profoundly unlucky for being born and raised in “the middle of nowhere.”</p> <p>As an aspiring designer, the design scene in Nebraska seemed nonexistent to me. I wanted to live in a cosmopolitan city such as San Francisco, or Seattle. Even Minneapolis was a bustling metropolis, in my mind. Yet I still felt stuck, because of family ties, a lack of social connections in other places, and