David Lee

Surprising progress from ~3 months of teaching the 8yo to do "keepy uppy" with a soccer ball. Some lessons learned... First, this skill is embedded in a larger goal that he cares about. He wants to be a better footballer (I hate calling it "soccer", which comes from a contraction of "association" 🤮). This means there is some baseline motivation. This helps you get through the times it sucks to practice. And by the way... It's ok if it sucks (just not too much). What you don't see here is him failing 1,000 times and rage quitting. Probably 1/3 of the sessions involve tears. But you get the biggest gains when you're in your "zone of proximal development" -- the place where it's not too hard, not too easy. It took a lot of cajoling to get him through the early sessions when there wasn't much progress yet. It has to be his choice. When he gets upset, I don't force him. I just ask him if he wants to quit. He never does. I think if I forced him to stick with it, he would be less motivated. By asking him to step outside his momentary frustration and make the decision to quit or not, I think I'm helping him have the space to think about how this connects to his larger goal. But I don't really know. Human motivation is mysterious. Long consistency + intensity, short duration. We do 15 minutes a day, every day. First thing in the morning. I believe duration of training is overrated. In school for example, I think we could get more learning in 30 intense minutes per day than we get in 6 hours a day plus homework now. It takes more effort to do 15 minutes of keepy uppy than it takes to do 2 hours of team practice. And I bet the payoff is higher. Same applies to learning anything. Encouragement is underrated. I watch him while I exercise and drink my coffee. I say "beautiful" even when he messes it up (I got that from Richard Williams, Venus and Serena's dad). I celebrate his PRs. I take videos and I chart his daily progress so he can see the wins. Three months ago he could get 3 at his max, now his average is over 30. Seeing this progress over time has made it easier for him to show up and do the work every day. One focus at a time. We interleave other soccer skills (like shooting and dribbling), but tend to hyper focus on one area at a time so that we see fast progress. We use the same principle in our homeschooling. We are always working on a few things at once, but there is only one priority at a time. Start easy to build momentum. When you start your kids on a skill, you just want to be able to get *any* success at all. Don't be afraid to make it so easy it almost doesn't seem like the same skill. When we started I had him let the ball bounce between each kick. If I didn't do that it would have been so much harder for him to do keep uppy that he might have just quit. You want kids to get momentum in any skill, and you shouldn't be afraid to make the first steps so easy it almost doesn't seem like even the same skill. Focus on fundamentals. You might ask if keepy uppy is even important, since the real game is played mostly on the ground. The reason is found in the slight shuffling of his feet between each hit. In the real game, the quality of your control touch, shooting, and dribbling primarily comes down to these micro foot movements and how they position your body for balance. Keepy uppy trains the nervous system to a level of precision that is otherwise hard to attain. For education, the analogy is probably to something like reading. Reading is fundamental and makes you better at learning everything else, even if what you're reading about is unrelated to what you'll learn later. Students today would probably be better off just reading more vs. doing most of what passes today for "education." Beware of thresholds. The best people at keep uppy are not pro footballers. Every skill has a threshold where getting better at it confers little extra benefit. In education, I think the most obvious example is math. Everyone needs to master some fundmentals, but beyond it's rare to become more successful by getting better at math. Your effort is better spent on some complementary skill where you are weaker. Dress for success. Just kidding. I don't know why he's dressed like a ninja. That's all for now. Would love to hear how you guys think about building skills in the comments. 🙏

Why do SUVs make you climb over the second row to get to the third row? Just put 3 doors on each side each row has its own door on both sides. If the car also came with amazingly simple-to-install car seats we’d soon see a baby boom in the American suburbs.

Why is Vacasa struggling? To put it bluntly, their operations suck. Pull up any market they operate in and their review scores will be lower than average for that geography. Why do their operations suck? Well, they manage 40,000+ properties nationwide. That's 40,000 unique homes each with their own unique set of quirks and challenges. Managing this many homes, while also managing almost as many owners and hundreds of thousands of guests is a herculean task. Arguably an impossible one. No matter how much technology you are able to incorporate into your operations, this is still a business that requires a level of human touch to excel. This is not just a property management business, it's also a hospitality business. I'm sure Vacasa's founders/management team knew that scaling operations was going to be brutally difficult, but when the company was founded in 2009 I bet they were projecting that there would be massive competitive advantages that would come with scale, such as: - More absolute dollars for tech investments - Better pricing data - Direct booking/branding They probably thought that their scale would make it impossible for local property managers to compete with them. But what actually happened in the 2010s is Airbnb exploded in popularity at the same time that VC money abounded, and an extremely competitive, well-funded SAAS ecosystem sprung up catering to the short-term rental industry. Now every mom-and-pop vacation rental owner and property manager can have a tech stack that is equally as good as Vacasa for less than $500/month. Vacasa is saddled with all the headaches that come with massive scale without the benefits. In fact, they are at a competitive disadvantage because small time property managers and self-managing owners are able to provide better service. They have the bandwidth to deliver the little human touch that makes a guest feel taken care of that Vacasa cannot. And this brings us back to the crux of the issue for Vacasa in our current moment. In Q4 revenue was down 19% as pricing was down 14% and the number of homes they managed was down 5%. Management blamed an increase in new supply coming online in their markets for the decrease in pricing. Of course new supply is bad for existing owners, but shouldn't that be good for Vacasa? After all, they just shifted their strategy last year from buying small property management shops to targeting individual owners, so they should be perfectly positioned to onboard all this new supply and grow the number of homes under management. Yet, the number of homes they manage was down 5%. So why are they not winning new properties? That takes us back to the beginning - because their operations suck. After 15 years of operation it should now be apparent to Vacasa that the disadvantages to scale outweigh the advantages. They are not winning new business for three main reasons: 1) It's easier than ever to self manage. Even compared to when I started in the industry in 2019, it's remarkable how far the industry software has come, from PMSs to pricing to software like Breezeway, guidebooks, direct bookings, etc. For a couple hundred bucks a month I have a tech stack that is on par with Vacasa. 2) In the same vein, it's easier than ever to spin up a small property manager. Any scale advantages that Vacasa might have had has been mitigated by SAAS providers who can make those larger investments for the smaller PMs. 3) When times get tougher, Vacasa's 25% property management fee gets tougher for a homeowner to swallow. In many cases they'll take over and self-manage to ensure that their vacation home remains profitable. So in summary, Vacasa is in a tough place and I don't see how they can structurally improve their position. I usually try to be as optimistic as possible to see what the market might be missing, but in this case I don't see. Would love to chat with someone optimistic about Vacasa's future - if that's you, please reach out. If you made it this far, bravo (also, it's Friday - go do something fun and get off Twitter 😀). $VCSA