What Actually Held Them

Over a decade ago I walked into a Boys and Girls Club in Vancouver for a job interview, and my first thought, standing in the doorway, was that it felt like camp.

I had never been in one before. I didn't grow up going to a Boys and Girls Club, I didn't know anybody who had, and I had no picture in my head of what I was walking into. So I had nothing to compare it against. I just stood there in the noise of it, marvelling.

Well over a hundred kids came through those rooms every day. They all knew each other. They knew the staff, and the staff knew them, and a good number of the staff had been those kids themselves ten years earlier and had simply never left. The coordinator who ran the whole club was one of the most established people in that community. He knew the families. He knew what they needed. Ours was the biggest club in the city and it stayed open the latest, and neither of those was an accident. That was one man understanding exactly what his neighbourhood required of him.

And what I remember thinking, standing there, was that these kids were so lucky. Not because of the fun of the place, though it was fun, but because of the camaraderie. The connection. They belonged to something, visibly, the way you belong to a cabin at camp.

I got the job.

---

I was fresh out of teacher's college. One year of subbing behind me at a school in Montreal, and then we moved to Vancouver and I landed here instead of in a classroom.

The program was called Raising the Grade. It was a pilot the club was running with Rogers, and the idea behind it was simple. Boys and Girls Clubs are built for younger kids, and at a certain age you're done, you age out, and you're gone right at the point where being gone matters most. So Raising the Grade held onto them through high school. Mentorships, opportunities, exploratory programs, tutoring. The stated goal, in plain language, was that these kids would graduate and have a plan for what came after.

I was the lead programmer. Which meant, as I understood it at the time, that I was the educator in the room.

---

I'll tell you honestly what I thought when I started, because it isn't flattering.

I thought the job was a little too easy.

These kids were fine. That is genuinely what I saw. They were funny and sharp and they had each other and they had this building and a staff who had known them since they were seven years old. Nobody in that room looked like they were about to fall off the edge of anything. I could not, for the life of me, see the risk the program had been built to catch.

So I did what a person fresh out of teacher's college does. I brought my ideas. I had an education and I was going to hand it over. I would teach. I would guide. I'd make sure they had a strong academic footing under them. And unfortunately, I graded myself harshly on how well I was pulling that off.

---

What I could not see, because I hadn't lived there and hadn't grown up there and had no way to know it yet, was everything outside the building.

Those kids lived in communities that struggled. They came from families that struggled. The version of them I met, connected and held and thriving, was the version that existed inside those rooms. It was real. It was the most dominant and prominent thing about them, and I'm glad it was the first thing I saw.

But I took it for the whole picture. I saw kids who were doing fine and concluded the program wasn't doing very much. It did not once occur to me that they were doing fine because of it.

---

Here's the part I got wrong in the most useful way possible.

I ran one-on-one sessions with every student. The program was a pilot. Rogers and the club needed feedback and I needed to know what was working, so I sat down with each kid and asked them what they liked, what they were interested in, how they felt about school, how they felt about the club.

I was collecting data. I filed it in my head under administration.

What I was actually doing was giving a teenager twenty uninterrupted minutes of one adult's complete attention.

I did not understand that at the time. Not even a little. In my head the real work was the tutoring and the programming and the plan for after graduation, and the one-on-ones were the paperwork around the edges of it.

---

There was one boy I still think about.

He did not want to be there. Not in a disruptive way, just in the ordinary way of a kid for whom school is not the thing. Less interested in homework, less interested in tutoring, less interested in every educational piece I put in front of him. If you had asked me to guess which student was getting the least out of that program, I'd have said his name without pausing.

And then he'd come in for his one-on-one, and he would plunk himself down in the chair across from me, and he'd talk.

About anything that wasn't school. What he was into. What he thought about things. On and on, easily, happily, for as long as I let him. He was so open. He was so obviously glad to be in that chair. And every single time it caught me completely off guard, because it did not match one other thing I knew about him.

I filed it under surprising. That's it. That's as far as I got with it for about ten years.

He was one of several kids in a busy house, in a neighbourhood where the adults were stretched thin. And what I think I was actually watching, across that desk, was a young person receiving something he did not get very often, which was one grown-up's undivided interest in him, specifically, for no other reason than that he was interesting.

---

Every student in that program graduated. Every one of them, the whole time I ran it.

And I was surprised every time.

Isn't that just ridiculous? I ran a program whose entire stated purpose was that these kids graduate. They all graduated. And my private assessment of my own performance was that I probably wasn't very good at this job.

Because I was grading myself on the wrong thing. I was grading myself as an educator. Was the teaching strong, was the academic support any good, were my programs well designed. Measured that way I was middling, and I knew it.

Meanwhile the thing that was actually working was happening in a chair in the corner of my office, and in a hundred conversations I wasn't even in, between those kids and their mentors and the staff who had known them for a decade. That whole club held them. It made sure nobody quietly slipped out the back. And the mechanism was never the academic support. It was that a lot of adults, consistently, over years, made it unmistakable to each of those kids that they mattered, and that somebody was paying attention to whether they made it.

Their graduating mattered to somebody else. So it started to matter to them.

---

It took me more than ten years to understand that, and I didn't get there through teaching. I got there through building a business.

The lesson those kids gave me turned out to be about me, and here it is: I have to clear away the whole pile of ideas about what a thing is supposed to look like before I can see what it actually is.

I thought I was supposed to be an educator, so I performed being an educator, and then I judged myself on the performance, and I missed the part that was working. The official, effortful, seemingly important version of the job was sitting right on top of the real one.

That clearing is now the thing I'm best at, and it's most of what I actually do in this business. Strip out what's supposed to matter. Find the crux. Say the thing plainly. And underneath, nearly every single time, it comes back to the same three: connection, attention, care.

I couldn't have told you that at twenty-five. I can tell you it now.

---

Now let me bring this over to your side of the table, because I want to talk about hope, and this is a strange year to be talking about it.

I'm a hopeful person. I have always been one. And for a long time I assumed that was just temperament, something handed to me at birth like eye colour, and that the people who don't have much of it simply weren't issued any.

I don't think that anymore.

I think hope is given to people, in small unremarkable doses, usually by somebody paying attention to them when there was no particular reason to. I think I was given a great deal of it, mostly by people who would be surprised to hear they'd done anything at all. And I think a building in Vancouver was handing it out twenty minutes at a time to a couple of hundred kids who mostly didn't know that's what was happening either.

Which means it isn't a mood, and it isn't a personality trait. It's something that gets passed between people. And it means that if you're running low on it right now, that is not information about your character.

---

So let's talk about the market, because that's where a lot of the hope has gone missing, and I want to tell you where I think it actually is.

You've had two things sold to you this year. Either it's all coming apart, or the recovery is nearly here and you'd better get positioned for the bounce. Doom, or a comeback. And notice that both of them are trying to move you with a forecast about something neither of them can see.

Here's what I believe, and it's less exciting than either.

Real estate is a stable, boring, durable place to put money, and it has been for a very long time. What happened in 2020 and 2021 was not the beginning of a new normal. It was an anomaly. A strange, once-in-a-generation distortion, and what we've been doing ever since is settling back toward what real estate has always actually been.

We're not in a collapse. We're in a correction back toward normal, and normal was never the problem.

And in an economy that feels this uncertain, that boring stability isn't a consolation prize. It's the entire product. The thing you own does not need a boom in order to work. It has never needed a boom in order to work. Rent gets paid. Principal gets paid down by somebody who isn't you. The building sits there, being a building, in a country where people are going to need somewhere to live for as far ahead as anyone can see.

That's the part that has quietly been doing most of the lifting the whole time. And almost nobody is grading themselves on it.

---

Which is the exact mistake I made in that office, running live in your business right now.

You have a scoreboard in your head, and I'd bet money on most of what's written on it. What the properties are worth. What they were worth in 2021. How many doors you have, and how many you thought you'd have by now. Whether the number went up this year or it didn't.

The Install

The Second Scoreboard. One small thing you can put into your business this week.

Look at that list properly. Nearly every item on it is decided by something well outside your reach. Rates. Policy. What a stranger is willing to pay. What the market feels like doing this quarter. Those numbers were spectacular in 2021 and they've been flat or unpleasant since, and neither of those was your doing.

Meanwhile, over in the corner where nobody's looking, the actual work has been going on. The tenancy you've kept for four years because you're decent to people and you fix things quickly. The turnover you did in nine days instead of six weeks. The principal your tenants paid down for you this year while you weren't watching. The disaster that never happened because you caught it in March. The capital you didn't lose, in a year when losing capital was easy.

None of that is on the scoreboard. So you feel like you're failing, in a year where you've quietly been doing the job well.

That isn't hopelessness. That's a measurement error, and it's fixable in about twenty minutes.

This takes about twenty minutes, once. Nothing to set up and nothing to maintain. You need a page and a willingness to look at what you've been quietly measuring yourself against.

Step 1: Write down the sentences you say to yourself. Not the ones you'd say out loud at a meetup. The ones that run at 2am, or in the car after you've driven past somebody else's new building. Write them the way they actually sound in your head, because the wording matters and you already know it off by heart.

\"I should be further along than this by now."\ \"Everybody who started when I did has more doors."\ \"I bought at the top."\ \"I haven't done a single thing this year."\ \"I'm not really an investor, I just own a couple of buildings."\ \"If I'd sold in 2021 I'd be sitting on a pile of money."\

Step 2: Find the comparison hiding underneath each one. Every sentence you just wrote is secretly a comparison. It has to be. \Further along\ is further along than something. \Haven't done a single thing\ is being measured against something. So go back through and write down what each one is being held up against, even when naming it is a bit embarrassing.

\Versus 2021. Versus the guy from the meetup. Versus the plan I wrote in 2019. Versus my brother-in-law. Versus the person I assumed I'd be by now.\

Then read that column on its own and notice what isn't in it.

Not one of those is a comparison against what you actually did. Not one. That's the whole finding, and it takes about ninety seconds to get to.

Step 3: Write down what your business actually did. Twelve months back, ugly lines, no particular order. \"Kept the Unit 2 tenants a fourth year."\ \"Turned the upstairs in nine days."\ \"Caught the leak in March before it got into the ceiling."\ \"Renegotiated the insurance."\ \"Didn't lose a dollar of anybody's capital."\ \"Answered every after-hours message within a day, every time."\

You'll find this list harder to write than the two above it, and that is exactly the point. Nobody has ever asked you for it.

Step 4: Let AI build the second scoreboard. Open any free tool you've already got, ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, and paste this above your two lists:

I'm a Canadian real estate investor with a full-time job and a small self-managed portfolio. Below are two lists. The first is a set of things I say to myself about how I'm doing, and underneath each one, what I've been comparing myself against. The second is a rough list of what actually happened in my business over the last twelve months. Do four things: (1) for each comparison in the first list, tell me in one plain sentence whether it is something I control, and where it isn't, name what it is actually measuring instead, (2) build me a second scoreboard of no more than six items, drawn only from things inside my control, using what I actually did rather than metrics you invent, (3) for each item on that scoreboard, tell me in one line how I would check it once a quarter without building anything new, and (4) tell me in three sentences what my last twelve months look like when read only against that second scoreboard. Use only what I gave you. Do not add metrics I did not mention, do not estimate or invent any numbers, and no pep talk.

What I say to myself, and what I'm comparing against: [paste]

What actually happened: [paste]

What comes back isn't a morale exercise. It's a plain list of the things you're actually responsible for, which turns out to be most of what determines whether you still own these buildings in ten years.

\\*Then do the one part that isn't logistics.\\* Keep the old comparisons, but demote them. What the market did isn't bad information and it isn't useless, it's weather. You check the weather so you know how to dress. You don't check the weather to find out whether you're any good. Put the new scoreboard somewhere you'll actually come across it, a note on your phone is fine, and read it the next time those sentences start up at 2am.

---

So that's the story this week, and it started in a doorway in Vancouver more than ten years ago.

I've been thinking about that building all week, which surprised me, because I hadn't thought about it properly in years. And what comes back isn't the programming or the plans I was so proud of. It's the noise in those rooms, and how many adults were standing in them.

Nobody argued those kids into a future. Nobody sat them down with a chart and made the case. They were held, by a building full of people who kept showing up and kept being interested, until the future stopped looking like something that happened to other people.

I think that might be what hope actually is. Not optimism, which is a forecast, and not confidence, which is a claim about yourself. Just the ordinary experience of being paid attention to by somebody who thinks you're going to make it.

So here's mine, for whatever it's worth to you on a Sunday. I think you're going to be fine. Not because the market is about to do something spectacular, but because the thing you own has never needed spectacular, and because the part of all this that's genuinely in your hands is the part you've quietly been getting good at for years.

The new program is nearly ready, by the way. The doors open this fall, and you'll hear it here first.

Next Sunday, I'll be back.

I'm glad you're here.

— Nicole