Indeed it is the small things that matter, be it with our city's health or with your own health.  In order to keep our city vibrant and healthy, we need to approach our city and our health in the same way.  Every day you make choices that either make you healthier and more energetic, or you make choices otherwise that over time, will make you ill.  Please ask yourself these questions as you debate this idea of our city's health alongside your own health.  Do you walk to your local farmers market in the summer and purchase fresh produce, supporting your body's health and the health of our local food system or do you buy unhealthier versions of our food produced overseas that often contain toxins our bodies cannot handle?  Do you ever support locally-owned small businesses, who make or buy their products locally or do you regularly drive miles outside the city and shop at big box stores?  Do you ever find yourself too tired and without enough energy to spend on getting involved with local charities or community events?  Further, are you a Cincinnatian that chooses to contribute to the health of our city by being positive and helping it evolve or do you choose to listen to and fuel the naysayers, buying into the notion that Cincinnati is in a silo with its problems and is not a city with world-class assets? 

The bottom line is that when you say or think negative thoughts, those thoughts are virally spread throughout the community you live in.  And guess what?  Those exact negative thoughts that are unhealthy to our city are also unhealthy to you, and will lead to stress-related illnesses.  Negativity leads to stress, stress leads to illness and illness takes away from you and our city evolving and growing.

Overall positivity, on the other hand, is viral as well and has a significant impact to our community spirit and pride, which inevitably is a major factor in attracting and retaining talent in our city.  It really is a matter of choice and attitude.  Being positive does not mean you have to agree with the consensus, but rather it means you are choosing to take a healthier outlook.  If you do not like something the way it is, then choose to change it or choose to find something else that makes you happy.  Cincinnati is not everything to everyone, but it certainly has something for everyone and it is up to you to choose to find those things about our city that make you feel positive and ultimately, healthy.

We are going to attempt to lay out just a few of the small things we love about our home city.  There are so many, but here are a few:

Neighborhoods
No doubt, Cincinnati has great neighborhoods.  Most cities are just a patchwork of roads, houses and strip malls, but our Queen city has 52 neighborhoods with main streets, locally-owned shops/restaurants and their coffee shops serve as community-gathering hotspots.  Other cities may have one or two neighborhoods comparable to Hyde Park or Mt. Lookout, but Cincinnati has an abundance -  Mariemont, O'Bryonville, Westwood and Clifton to name several more.

Perhaps it is these main streets that help people congregate and form a sense of community, which is extraordinarily high in our city.  Community is hard to quantify and compare to other cities, but perhaps it is evident how much an asset it is by the simple fact that Cincinnati ranks fourth in donations to charities, even when compared to metros that have 2-6 times our population.  Who wouldn't want to live in a city where their neighbors are giving and care about each other?

Young Leadership and Opportunity
We often hear from our friends in other cities, "how did you get the opportunity to help grow your city's largest young professional volunteer organization?" or "how did you get involved with an election campaign" or "how did you get to meet CEOs and other city leaders?"  It really is quite simple - all you have to do is start asking the people around you.  You will be amazed to find out how your neighbors, co-workers and friends are involved in the community.  But what is even further amazing, is that it's the young leaders in our city who are amassing the momentum and positive change.  Take for instance Agenda 360 and Vision 2015 - both of these organizations are being largely driven by young leaders.  They are comprised of people you work with and live next to and are greatly influencing change with everyone from CEOs to local farmers and our public officials.  Who wouldn't want to live in a city where our young, creative thought-leaders are leveraging the opportunity to lead the charge?

Big City, Small Town
Cincinnati truly has a unique and special combination of big city amenities and small town flair.  We get to cheer on all the big professional and collegiate sports teams but also appreciate our local high school teams.  We have perennial events like the Flying Pig Marathon and Thanksgiving Day races that attract people from all over the nation, but also smaller neighborhood races such as The Hyde Park Blast that also draw participants from coast to coast.  What about Oktoberfest - North America's largest celebration of its kind, and also all the smaller toasts happening in our quaint local pubs in Mainstrasse?  Or, if you're looking to get out of town for the day or weekend, how great is it that within a 5-hour drive of Cincinnati you can find yourself in Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, the coasts of Michigan and the beautiful rolling hills of Ohio and Kentucky; also, we are a short flight from DC, Atlanta and NYC!  Cincinnati has an unlimited buffet of events and amenities to choose from, so who wouldn't want to live in a city where the entertainment and community options are limitless?

It seems no matter where your travels can take you, you can always find that the perception of a local can easily become overly critical, making it hard to see and appreciate the wonderful attributes about where they have lived their whole life.  We were lucky enough to experience the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver with friends from Cincinnati, NYC and Chicago.  Despite our postcard-beautiful surroundings, we managed to encounter locals with a negative view of their city; one local telling us that "Vancouver isn't normally this great."  Even a city that is regularly ranked in the top 5 cities in the world - and while hosting a world class event - has an inferiority complex!

Leading up to the Games, naysayer forces protested and captured a lot of media attention.  Public sentiment for the Games in Vancouver was lukewarm at best.  Surveys showed a surprising lack of support for one of the world's most prestigious events.  Rather than spend precious time appeasing all the naysayers, local leaders pressed on because they were confident of their knowledge and had spent the time to educate themselves about the long-term positive effects the Games would have on their city.  Sure enough, as the Olympics drew closer, the tide turned and support of the games was overwhelming.  Vancouverites were out in front of the naysayers, and that became the storyline of the Vancouver Olympics.  This is what we need in Cincinnati.  We need to continue our momentum with this same confident attitude and persistence; promote our city, not only to the rest of the world, but to each other and that, is what will drown out the naysayers.

Sure, Cincinnati has problems that need to be addressed, but so does Vancouver and every other city.  We would like to share some perspective though; we have both have lived in, worked in or traveled to every major city in the US and Canada and each of them also have their issues, many with bigger and more complex issues.  That said, Cincinnati is definitely not alone in the issue department.  We have seen though, that a differentiator across cities is attitude and how a city and its residents collectively tackle its problems.

In Vancouver, there is a huge drug addiction and homelessness problem.  There are gang wars in the suburbs, traffic chaos during rush hour, and the list goes on.  Many of Vancouver's problems are much bigger than our own here in Cincinnati and it is not because Vancouver is that much bigger of a city (our metro areas both have about 2.1 million residents).  The difference is that the majority of Vancouverites do not dwell on the negatives and they instead choose to focus on and appreciate the positives of their city, which in turn helps them to collectively tackle their problems.

Perhaps, you are thinking it may be easier for Vancouverites to think this way because of the city's obvious strengths - namely, its incredible scenery and moderate climate.  Cincinnati may not have those same obvious aesthetic strengths (although, we both have always thought our city is quite beautiful even given where we grew up), but when you dig just a bit deeper beneath the surface you will uncover all the small things that make a city truly great; you will find that Cincinnati is a world class city with just as much, if not more to offer than cities such as Toronto and Denver, and that is why we choose to make our home here. 

People often ask how we got to live here and why we continue to live here, but we in turn simply say "why not?"