This isn't a post about restaurants or real estate.
It's about your own personal work.
Location so often drives the rhythms of work. You can't not pick up on it, even with iron will.
At best, you can cancel out a location through clarity of work and mental focus. But then, you're missing the natural rhythms and inspiration of where you are.
You've no doubt seen this yourself, but in some places you'll be more productive than others.
Again, you can train focus and clarity to cancel this effect somewhat. Or, you could own it and go with it.
If a location gets a positive association with high-quality work and good moods, then use it to your advantage. Seek out new places to turn into fantastic sources of inspiration and good work places. In the Chaoyang District of Beijing, I found an amazing obscure art cafe with low cloudy lighting, a space-like hyper-modern decor, and consistently playing good low electronic music.
Knowing that the place was special to me, I only went there in certain moods and just created new things like crazy while I was there.
The flipside is that sometimes you'll get places where you're consistently stuck and screwing around.
You could clarity/focus/train your way out of them, and maybe there's a good reason to. But the pragmatic approach might just be to recognize that that's what's going on, and avoid those places.
If it's your own home or office, you could alternatively try moving things around. Pushing a desk into the corner and throwing a cool map, painting, or goals board in front of you might do the trick. I once converted an unproductive apartment to a highly productive one doing just that.
I won't say you should move where you live to be more productive, because it'd sound silly. But if, by chance, you're somewhere live Southeast Asia where moving between furnished apartments on short-term rentals is trivially easy and inexpensive, then you might try it. I was very productive in the Ruby Hotel in Saigon, and it was about as cheap as Western rent. There's some great furnished apartments in District 1 and District 3 of Saigon as well. If one place is noisy or unpleasant in any way, you might just try moving.
And a final point -- there's a time-based component to location. If you catch yourself having a magical conversation or work session somewhere, do what you can to run it out and not move until all the gains are complete. I've been socializing a lot recently, and too often people say "let's go somewhere else" -- I don't know why, maybe it's an American thing to change locations to keep things fresh. But if you're near peak creativity or performance, moving is very dangerous. It shifts mindset and mood, and mindset and mood are huge to doing creative work or having interesting conversations.
Bear location in mind. It's key to success. Of course, train in clarity and focus. But be pragmatic too -- make sure you live somewhere conducive to great creativity and work, and seek those places out as places to go in your life.