Who’s Your Mrs. McReynolds?

During my senior year of high school, I was taking calculus from a teacher named Mrs. McReynolds. She was middle-aged and no-nonsense, and I was doing well in her class until the last week of the fall semester, when I came down with the worst flu of my life. I could barely get out of bed. But I had to take the calculus final on the assigned date or lose my chance at earning college credit.

I took the test in terrible shape and didn’t do well enough to get credit. That was it, as far as I was concerned. My career as a mathematician was over before it really started. Until I screwed up that final, I took a lot of pride in my math skills. But now I saw myself as a failure. I transferred into a lower-level class and tried to put the whole thing behind me.

On the first day of the spring semester I was settling into my new seat hoping no one would notice me, when I heard a knock on the door. Mrs. McReynolds walked in. She said a few words to my new teacher, looked around the room, and then pointed right at me.

Out in the hall, she told me she was troubled by what happened. One bad day, she said, was no reason to quit a pursuit I cared a lot about. She wanted me back in her class, even though I hadn’t excelled on the final. I went back.

I’ve been thinking about what I’d call the soapbox derby moment. You know the race—kids build their own little cars and send them down a ramp. All it takes to get moving is a little push at the start. Then the car goes forward on its own.

Mrs. McReynolds gave me the push I needed. Not because she tutored me or changed my grade. All she did was walk down a hallway and say she thought I should come back to her class, that I should stay the course on the long-term path to my dreams. She gave me permission to believe in myself. And that was enough.

About 40 years later, my high school in Kansas called. They wanted to put me in the Lawrence Lions Alumni Association Hall of Honor, and it was tied to a fundraising campaign for scholarships for students going to the University of Kansas. I told them I’d fund an endowment, but only if they named it for Mrs. McReynolds. They agreed, and gave me her phone number.

So I called her up. She remembered me right away and wanted to talk about math. Did I remember the quadratic formula? I told her what she’d done for me. That hallway conversation she had with me set everything else in my life in motion. (You can’t really pursue a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago if you give up on calculus.) She listened to all I had to say and she was happy for me, but she just didn’t think what she did was such a big deal.

I think about that a lot. Many people who give you the push you need don’t know they’re doing it. Mrs. McReynolds just thought she was doing her job. Her urging me to stick with calculus might have been just another conversation for her, but that moment has stayed with me to this day.

Do you have someone like that in your life? A teacher, maybe. A coach. For a lot of us in later adulthood, our financial advisor might play this role: someone who believes in our plan, even when we’re having a hard time believing in it ourselves.

Over the years, I’ve spoken to many investors who credit their advisors with keeping them in their seats when times are tough, who help them zoom out when they’re looking at life through a magnifying glass. Just like a high-school math teacher, a financial advisor has seen it all before, and that perspective is priceless. In your journey through investing and life, who is your Mrs. McReynolds?

Stay calm, stay invested, and let markets work for you.

David