There was probably a time when I assumed the most interesting careers happened in the biggest cities.
It makes sense. Major cities have corporate headquarters, large employers, airports, universities, conferences, restaurants full of people having business meetings, and office buildings that make it seem like important things are happening inside.
I still understand the appeal. Chicago has played an important role in my professional life, and being connected to a major business center creates opportunities.
But living in Geneva, Illinois, has reinforced something my career has taught me again and again: interesting work isn’t limited by a city boundary.
My career has taken me through manufacturing, operations, international sourcing, supply chain management, sales, and business development. I’ve worked with different industries, suppliers, customers, and business problems. Some of that work has stretched far beyond Illinois and even beyond the United States.
None of it requires me to live in a downtown high-rise.
Interesting Work Isn’t Always Glamorous Work
I think part of the misconception comes from how we define an interesting career.
We tend to associate interesting work with industries or jobs that sound impressive when you explain them at dinner. In reality, some of the most interesting problems I’ve encountered have involved things most people never think about.
How do you get the right material to the right place when a supplier is having trouble? What happens when a production schedule changes unexpectedly? How do you tell a customer that the timeline they want isn’t realistic? When should you take a chance on a new supplier? Why does a process that looks perfectly reasonable on paper fall apart when people actually try to use it?
Those questions don’t require a skyscraper.
They require people who understand how businesses work.
Manufacturing taught me this early. An enormous amount happens behind the products people use every day. Materials have to be sourced. Equipment has to work. Employees have to know what they are doing. Quality has to be maintained. Products have to move. Customers have to receive what they ordered.
Once you start paying attention to everything required to make that happen, the work becomes pretty interesting.
Geography Still Matters, Just Differently
I also don’t believe location has become irrelevant.
Where you live still matters. Where your customers are matters. Where suppliers operate matters. Transportation matters. Airports matter. Time zones matter. If you work in manufacturing and supply chains long enough, you learn pretty quickly that geography hasn’t disappeared.
What has changed for me is how I think about being connected to those things.
Geneva gives me a home base in the broader Chicago region without requiring me to live in Chicago itself. I can be part of the region’s economic life while also living somewhere with a different pace.
That balance works for me.
Chicago is close enough that I can take advantage of what a major city offers. O’Hare connects the region to the rest of the country and the world. Businesses and industries spread far beyond downtown. At the end of the day, I can return to Geneva and a community that feels very different from the center of a major city.
I don’t see those things as contradictory.
Some of the Most Important Businesses Aren’t Downtown
Working in manufacturing and operations also changes your mental picture of where business happens.
A lot of important economic activity takes place in industrial parks, warehouses, factories, distribution centers, supplier facilities, and offices that nobody is going to photograph for a magazine cover.
I’ve walked into facilities where the building looked completely ordinary from the outside, only to discover complicated operations inside. Products were being made, orders were moving across the country, employees were solving problems, and decisions were being made in that building that affected customers hundreds or thousands of miles away.
That gave me a different appreciation for what an interesting workplace looks like.
You can drive past a building every day without realizing that the company inside buys materials internationally, sells products across the country, or plays an important role in another company’s supply chain.
Interesting business is happening in a lot more places than people realize.
International Work Doesn’t Require an International Address
International sourcing made this even clearer to me.
Working internationally sounds like something that should require living in New York, Chicago, London, or another major global city. In practice, international business is often much more practical than glamorous.
You are trying to understand lead times. You are comparing suppliers. You are working through quality expectations. You are figuring out transportation. You are communicating across cultures and time zones. Sometimes you are trying to understand why something that was supposed to happen Tuesday still hasn’t happened Friday.
The international part makes the work more complex, but the underlying questions are often surprisingly familiar.
Can this person or company do what they said they would do? Do we understand each other? Is the quality right? Can we depend on this relationship when something goes wrong?
You can work through those questions from Geneva just as easily as you can from an office downtown.
A Career Gets Interesting When You Stop Following a Straight Line
I also think my perspective comes from working across different parts of the business.
I haven’t spent my entire career looking at the same problem from the same chair.
Sales taught me to think about what customers actually want. Operations taught me whether we can deliver it. Manufacturing showed me how many things have to go right before a finished product reaches someone. Sourcing taught me that a low price and a good decision aren’t always the same thing.
Moving between those areas made the work more interesting because each one changed how I understood the others.
That has mattered more to my career than whether my office happened to be located in the middle of a major city.
Build Your Career Around Experience, Not an Address
For someone early in a career, I wouldn’t automatically assume that moving to the biggest possible city is the only way to find opportunity.
Instead, I would look closely at the work itself.
Will you get responsibility? Will you be exposed to different parts of the business? Will you work with people who know things you don’t? Will you have opportunities to solve real problems? Will you understand how the company makes money and how your role contributes to that?
I would also pay attention to industries that don’t always get much attention. Manufacturing, logistics, sourcing, distribution, construction, and other practical businesses can expose you to complicated problems early in your career.
Most importantly, don’t confuse an impressive address with an interesting job.
Geneva Gives Me the Balance I Want
At this stage of my life, I appreciate being connected to Chicago without feeling that I need to live in the middle of it to have an interesting professional life.
Geneva gives me that balance.
I can have a career that involves manufacturing, customers, suppliers, operations, sales, and international business while living in a community where my family has established its routines.
Maybe that is what experience has changed most for me. I used to think opportunity was mostly about getting yourself to where everything was happening.
Now I think opportunity has much more to do with putting yourself close to interesting problems and being willing to learn how to solve them.
Those problems exist everywhere.
Some of them are much closer to home than you might think.