This article by Derek Sivers sure has me thinking.

If you’re local, then you’re probably social, doing a lot of things in-person, and being a part of your community. But this means you’ll have less time to focus on creating things for the world.

If you’re global, then you want to focus on creating things that can reach out through distribution to the whole world. But this means you’ll have less time to be part of your local community.

My programmer brain can often lead me to seek a black and white answer for things. Am I global or local? Choose. This, like most things, ends up being much more gray than that.

When you have children, there’s some level of local that just seems necessary. If leaving a legacy of some kind is important to you, “locally” investing time and energy into your kids will likely affect many generations of your family. At the same time, I’m convinced that “global” blog posts, app.net posts, and tweets may be read by generations of your family and many others to give them a real glimpse into what your life was like.

For me, life would be pretty rough without a heavy emphasis of time spent on “local” family and church community. That being said, I’d like most of my professional work to be global without feeling pressured to have too many in-person meetings.