I used to think ambition was mostly internal.
I thought some people simply wanted more. More responsibility, more achievement, more money, more impact, more difficult problems. Others did not.
I do not believe that anymore.
Ambition is personal, but it is also environmental.
The places around you shape what you consider normal. They shape the size of your reference points. They shape the risks you are willing to take and the future you can imagine.
I have felt this by moving between different contexts: building in Tirana, working in public technology and education, studying and working in Munich, meeting people through startups, AI, and venture.
Each place has changed my sense of what is possible.
Not because one city has ambitious people and another does not. That would be too simple, and it would be unfair. Ambitious people exist everywhere. Talent exists everywhere. Curiosity exists everywhere.
What changes is proximity.
In some places, the person building the kind of company you dream about is someone you can meet. The investor, researcher, engineer, founder, or operator is not an abstract person on the internet. They are part of your environment. You can hear how they think, notice what they worry about, and realise that they are more human than their profile suggests.
That changes you.
It is difficult to imagine a future when you have never seen anyone near you live inside it. It is difficult to believe you can build something global when every example around you feels local. It is difficult to take a large risk when nobody in your immediate world treats that risk as understandable.
This is why I think environments matter so much for young people.
An ambitious environment does not only give you opportunities. It gives you permission.
Permission to try something before you are fully qualified.
Permission to care about work that seems too large for your current position.
Permission to meet people who are ahead of you without feeling that you do not belong in the room.
Permission to fail publicly and continue anyway.
The best environments make ambition feel less like arrogance and more like responsibility.
They make you ask better questions. They force you to update your standards. They expose you to people who are moving faster, thinking more clearly, or solving problems you had not even noticed yet.
That can be uncomfortable. It should be.
If every room makes you feel like the most ambitious person in it, you are probably in the wrong rooms too often.
But there is another side to this.
I do not want to romanticise famous cities or elite networks. A place can have enormous energy and still make people feel replaceable. It can be full of opportunity and still reward performance over depth. It can make people more ambitious while also making them less grounded.
The goal is not to be in the loudest place.
The goal is to be in places that make you more serious.
Places that make you want to do better work.
Places that introduce you to people who challenge your assumptions without making you smaller.
Places where possibility feels real enough to act on.
I think people underestimate how much their surroundings affect their trajectory. The people you see every week, the conversations you overhear, the examples you absorb, and the standards you slowly accept all become part of your internal model of the world.
That is why I want to be deliberate about where I spend time.
Not because geography determines destiny.
But because geography changes the questions you are willing to ask.
And better questions can change everything.