Podcast: Play in new window
Lauryn Williams joins David McAlvany to discuss the financial realities behind elite athletic success. A four-time Olympic medalist and Certified Financial Planner, Lauryn shares why many athletes take on debt to compete, how short the earning window can be, and the biggest misconceptions about what Olympians actually make. She and David also explore the mindset required to perform at the highest level and the importance of education, discipline, and long-term thinking. The conversation also covers why gold can serve as a strong foundation for long-term wealth. Learn more about Lauryn Williams: https://www.lauryn-williams.com/meet-lauryn
They also discuss Vaulted’s initiative to award first-place finishers with $30,000 in physical gold as a way to recognize athletic achievement with an asset designed to hold value beyond the podium. https://parade.com/entertainment/olympians-real-gold-1912-lauryn-williams-exclusive
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0:00 Intro
2:06 Lauryn’s background and path to the Olympics
6:21 Team dynamics, mindset, and competing at the highest level
9:55 Athlete finances, debt, and becoming a financial planner
20:12 Gold, Olympic medals, and Discipline
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Kevin: Welcome to the McAlvany Weekly Commentary. I’m Kevin Orrick along with David McAlvany.
Dave, you had an unusual conversation with Lauryn Williams, an athlete who has won medals both in the Winter and the Summer Olympics.
David: Yeah. Amazing to see someone who’s competed four different places around the world, Sochi, Athens, London, and in China as well. A 100-meter racer is someone who’s got some real talent. I mean, it’s down to fractions of fractions of seconds to be the fastest person in the world. And so to medal and to be in the top two, three in the world in that event is meaningful. Then to translate all that power into what she can do in a bobsled is great.
As we talked to Lauryn Williams, a four-time Olympian and first women, as you mentioned, to win both the Summer and Winter games, that is certainly a part of her legacy. I was fascinated as we got to the end of the conversation that for her, her greatest accomplishment was nothing to do in the world of sports, but was something that she had just recently discovered. The beauty of motherhood and what it means to lead in a different way, to inspire in a different way.
And she’s been both an inspiration and a leader on the Olympic team. And she competed not only individually but also in teams, in various relay events, and of course, the bobsled is a two person team as well.
And so, I was left with the impression that here’s a woman who is a reader, here is a woman who is legacy-minded, both from the standpoint of high levels of competition and wants to win—is there to do one thing: win.
So many people in the world of business can win, and it’s at the expense of other people. That sometimes is the unfortunate case of zero-sum game. I think, for her, being legacy minded, being a lifetime learner, these are things that were very impressive to me.
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Lauryn Williams, great to have you join us today. I don’t know that I’ve had the privilege of speaking with someone who’s won as many medals as you have at a level of competition that is second to none. There’s athletes all over the world who aspire to someday be in the Olympics. And you’ve been there not once, not twice—Athens, London, Sochi. The accolades for you as a sports professional just go on and on. Tell us a little bit about yourself, just kind of background for our listeners.
Lauryn: So a little bit about me, I’m born in Pennsylvania, raised in Michigan. Split time between both because my parents split up. Then I went on to the University of Miami, and then I moved to Texas for a little bit. When I say a little bit, about 10 years, and now I live in Medellin, Columbia.
The things that I think my mom would say are important if she was saying, “This is my daughter, let me tell you about her,” is that at age nine-ish, I got home faster than the family German Shepherd. And she was like, “I got to get my daughter into a track and field program.”
My dad’s story, on the other hand, is a little bit different. He says we were at the Carnegie Science Center, and there was a Flo-Jo hologram, and I didn’t see anything else at the Science Center that day, I only raced the hologram until I beat it. I don’t think it was set at World Record pace back then, but that’s when he knew I had some promise for track and field.
And I was really fortunate that my parents instilled in me the importance of education. And so I wasn’t really thinking about track as a thing that I was going to do long-term, or the Olympics. I didn’t really understand what it meant to be in the Olympics. I just liked running faster than the boys in my neighborhood. I was like, “Okay, I can beat the girls. Now I can beat the boys.” Then I started to beat boys older than me, and I just thought it was a really cool thing to be able to brag about.
I wanted to be able to use my education in order to be able to help people, because my godmother and my godfather were a neonatologist and an anesthesiologist, and I saw their big house. I saw the fun parties that they had. And I just thought, “Education is the key to get me the money so I can do whatever I want.” And at a young age, that was the extent of my thought process.
David: Well, would love to hear about your journey to becoming first American woman to medal in both the Summer and Winter Games.
Lauryn: Yeah, I think that the journey was just kind of mapped out for me. So in 2004, I was a junior in college. I was just focusing on winning the NCA championships, and I was so excited for that opportunity. I had gone my freshman and sophomore year to the national championships, but I had not won, and my sole focus that year was winning the NCAA championships. No thought of the Olympics had crossed my mind.
I get to the NCAA championships, I run the second-fastest time in the world. I do win. And now I’m the fastest American heading into the Olympic Trials. And I was just like, “Oh my goodness, what do I do?” Luckily, I had a coach that helped me just kind of navigate the world of becoming a professional athlete. I made it to my first Olympic Games in 2004 at 20 years old, and then on went the journey. 2008 in China, 2012 in London.
And the cool part, I think, of the story is, everybody says like, “How did you become a bobsledder? What was that path like?”
I met a girl in the airport. Reading is fundamental. I love to read. I read an article about a fellow Olympian who had tried bobsled and enjoyed it, and she and I were in the airport headed to a race. So she came back to track and field. We were both just randomly heading over to Rome and met in the same airport, and I asked her about it. “How was it? What was your experience like? How did you find bobsled?”
And she’s like, “Lauryn, you got to try it.” And it’s the Olympic year. And I was like, “The Olympic year? How do you become Olympian in bobsled?” That was not a thought process of mine at all. But I did go ahead and give it a try because I knew I was getting ready to retire from track and field. And so, little did I know, six months later I would be at the Olympic Games.
David: It combines both team dynamics because you’ve done track and field relay, as well as competing on your own, and bobsled, again, it’s a team dynamic. How would you compare, how would you contrast the difference between being an individual competitor, this is your event, it’s all on you, versus the working collaboratively with someone else or with a team.
Lauryn: Yeah, I think my path was divinely made for me to be prepared to win that medal in bobsled. And I mean that in a way that in 2004, 2008, I was a part of the four-by-one Olympic relay team, and we didn’t have any success.
And a lot of things happened behind the scenes, but what I realized is what we need to be able to do to work together, especially when you have different chemistries. We’re taught to compete against each other all year long, so these are the same girls that you are racing to beat, racing for a spot on the Olympic team. And then they throw you all together and say, “Go win Olympic gold medal for Team USA.” And we botched it, like I said, not just once but twice.
What I realized is what was going wrong in those two Olympic Games, so that when I was brought to the third Olympic Games, I said, “Hey guys, I know how to make this work. The one thing I can bring is my experience,” because a lot of the other members were new members of the Olympic team for the first time.
And so I said, “We got to cut the fighting out. We’ve got to be able to get on the same page. We’ve got to have chemistry.” And I think that was also the catalyst for me having what I needed to be able to switch over into bobsled, which is much more of a team sport, much more cohesive. But learning how to unify people was a skillset I had to learn from the trials and tribulations we had in 2004, 2008.
David: Yeah, that’s amazing. I’m curious about the psychology of competitive athletes and what you look back on in the various competitions you’ve had all over the world, what’s the most valuable advice you’ve been given to manage your own psychology? Some days you show up and it’s a great day, some days you don’t. And to be able to manage the ups and downs of a highly competitive environment, do you feel like you got what you needed in terms of psychological coaching? And what would be something that you would add to the mix?
Lauryn: I feel like the thing that I got or that I learned from the situation was: control what you can control. There are so many things outside of your control, and we’ve got to pivot in those moments and make the most of them, but the main focus should be on what you can control. And I remember very clearly in the 2004 Olympic Games, one of my competitors making just like these crazy grunting noises and screaming and yelling. It was meant to be a distractor to us. And it was very distracting because it was just like, “What is she doing? Is she having a seizure? Does she have a medical issue?” It was just not normal sounds that would come up. And I had to say, “Hold on a second, Lauryn. Why are you here?” I am here to get to the finish line first. That is the sole purpose that I have for being here right now in this moment. Does not matter what noise, what is happening around me.
And in the same way that you can drown out the crowd and drown out the things around you, I needed to control what I can control. Her noise-making I could not. But getting to that finish line, hearing the gun and zoning in on the starter was something that was within my control. And when I started to think of things about, what can I control versus obsessing about the things that I couldn’t control that maybe were bothering me, I started to have a lot more success.
David: Great point. Can you tell us about your mission to help elite athletes have a better handle on their finances?
Lauryn: Yeah. I started in track and field, like I said, at age 20 as a professional, and I didn’t know that that was going to be my future or my fate, if you will. I had very little financial literacy at that point. I was a junior in college. I was a finance major. And now looking back, I think so many of us look at what we learned in college and the information you could throw out the window versus information that is absolutely necessary. And personal finance is different from the broad major of finance. And then I just didn’t have a lot of life experience.
So I ended up in the hands of a family friend as a financial advisor. And I didn’t know that there were different types of advisors. I didn’t know what kind of questions to ask a financial advisor, but I did know that I had an opportunity to make more than anybody in my immediate family had made, and I didn’t want to waste it.
And so I was like, “Hey, what do I need to do?” And I didn’t get good answers from that advisor. So I fired him, hired another guy, thought that was going to go better. It didn’t. And then I got frustrated. I said, “What does somebody do when they’re willing to pay for help to organize their finances, but they can’t find someone?”
And so I went online and I found the certified financial planning coursework, and honestly, I rolled in it just trying to teach myself stuff about money because I didn’t understand the basics of creating a financial plan for myself or the basics of personal finance.
The coursework itself put a light bulb on, if you will. And as I learned these things, I was asking my friends, “Well, do you have a SEP IRA? Are you using a solo 401(k)?” And they’re like, “What are you talking about, Lauryn?”
And that’s when I realized it wasn’t just me that had this gap as a professional athlete who was earning well. It was a bunch of us that were being neglected, and had a good earning potential and a good opportunity to make the most of a very short window of earning well, but we weren’t doing it. And so I wanted to be the change I wanted to see in that regard.
David: At Vaulted, we share your mission to support America’s top athletes. So as you know, we’ve started this initiative giving $30,000 of real gold for each first place finish, and we’re very excited about that. I think, in part we see that there’s a challenge for many professional athletes. I’d love for you to share with us what the biggest misconception the public has about an elite athlete’s financial reality.
Lauryn: I think the biggest misconception is that when you win, you’re set for life. In the United States, you are not set for life by simply winning an Olympic gold medal. In the same way that we have 1% of America that is the affluent, we have 1% of those that are making the Olympic team that are earning in a situation where they could be set for life based on the earnings and the endorsements and things that come in.
There are a lot of athletes that do not earn anything the following year after competing in sport, or earn very little, or they only earn what is given by Team USA for the Olympic medal. There is a program, Operation Gold, now where there is some money given to you, some cash given to you for your competition and your role. But after you spent years of training, even if you just go with the year before the Olympic Games—the amount that you invest into having coaching and housing and proper food, physiotherapy, nutrition—the $30,000 that they give you is pretty much used up.
To compete on a world stage level, that’s not millions and trillions of dollars. It’s not something that’s going to make a long-term impact on your life. It’s going to probably clear the debt or replenish whatever you saved in order for you to be able to move on. And like I said, the hundreds of thousands or millions that a lot of people think that we make is few and far between.
David: Yeah. So if there’s a small percentage of people who can monetize their professional sporting abilities, we see endorsements as a potential way for— But what percentage of professional athletes actually get those endorsements, what would your guess be?
Lauryn: Oh, I would say it’s a very small percent. Like I said, I made the team in 2004 and there were no outside endorsements. My only sponsor was Nike, which was the shoe company, and which in track and field specifically, that’s the main way you’re considered a pro athlete is that a shoe company gives you some sort of contract. So there’s not like the NFL or NBA where you’re like a W-2 employee of a team of some sort. You’re not a W-2 employee of the United States Olympic Committee either. And so, yeah, 2004, there weren’t very many endorsements at all.
A few things came afterward, but they’re usually like one-year contracts or they’ll do six- or eight-month contracts that say, “We want to use your name during this Olympic timeframe. We want to use your name for the next year.” It’s not a long-term, four-year or 10- or 12-year thing. It’s just like, “Here’s an influx of money so that we can work off of you and work off the hype that is happening around you.”
But a very small percentage of athletes get those opportunities. I think now the branding opportunity that athletes have that I didn’t have necessarily when I was competing, was being able to use social media as a platform to talk to other sponsors and be an ambassador of different sports.
David: So if income after the professional event, after the winning of a medal, is something that is less predictable, what’s a story that you’ve heard from an athlete that really illustrates the struggle of what’s after standing on the stage and receiving those medals?
Lauryn: Oh, there’s so many, but one that stands out to me is my very first Olympic Games. In 2004, I was on my way home. We were in the airport. I was with a fellow athlete. We had the same agent, so we had the same flight booked. And he’s like, “I’m so excited to only have to work 40 hours per week.” He’s like, “I’m going down to 40 hours.” And I was completely confused because I was a junior in college. So I went from college to the Olympic Games and now I was going to be a full-time professional athlete. And the contract that I had, I did not have to work. And there’s a big difference between, like I said, events as well.
I was a 100-meter runner. That’s kind of a premier event for the Olympic Games. Everybody’s tuning in to see who’s the fastest man and woman in the world. He was a high jumper, and he had just won the same silver medal that I had won in his event at the Olympic Games, the second-best high jumper in the world. And he was not planning on not working at all. He was planning on going down from an 80-hour work week to a 40-hour work week at that time. That was what the income that he was going to receive was going to help him do.
David: Do you find professional athletes end up with debt? What does that look like?
Lauryn: Yeah. Unfortunately, it is par for the course that a lot of athletes, like I said, at various events are ending up in debt. And the thing that I’ve been fortunate to be able to do, I think sometimes people think of what a financial planner does, and we think of wealth management and investing and those pieces of the puzzle, but the thing that was really important to me was being able to help people on a foundational, baseline-level basis.
And I helped them figure out how to take out the best amount of debt. “Let’s take it from here versus here because this will have a lower interest rate.” Let’s think about how long you’re going to train for before we give it up because you’re in too much debt to maybe recuperate if you take on a regular job. What are the cause and effects of you deciding this? How can we take on this debt responsibly, and how can we make a plan to be able to pay it off responsibly if you’re going to take on debt?”
And I think that’s a reality that, like you said, not a lot of people are thinking of or not a lot of financial planners would be interested in. It was like, debt is bad and that’s it. This is someone’s dream. This is someone’s goal that could be once in a lifetime, and if they achieve it, it’s something that no one can take away from them. So why not let somebody make a calculated decision and an educated decision to be able to take on that debt, versus just kind of willy-nilly swiping a credit card and going about it and then having to pay the price later?
David: It’s such an interesting setup because you’ve got kids who go to college, and very often they’ll graduate with $100,000 in debt, $150,000 in debt. If you go on to a master’s program or law school or medical school, you could have a half million dollars in debt. What’s the kind of range you’re talking about? Is it tens of thousands of dollars, six figures, for a professional athlete who’s pursued their dream? But very different than a doctor who you could say, “Well, hey, eventually you’re going to be able to work this off,” the pay scale is sufficient to ultimately pay back a half million dollar liability.
Lauryn: Yeah, I would say it’s probably around $30,000 on average. That was kind of the threshold for what I was seeing as a regular amount of debt that athletes were having to take on or a normal amount of expenses to be able to cover things, and where people start to just feel uncomfortable. $70,000 or $80,000 of debt, it’s a harder hole to dig yourself out of.
And like I said, one of the things I was fortunate to be able to do is kind of forecast that, because a lot of people don’t think about what happens in the future. They’re just thinking about what’s happening in the moment. They’re betting on themselves, hoping that it will all pay off, that they’ll be able to write a check for it at the end of the day because performances have played out.
But my job is to be able to say, “Okay, what if it doesn’t? What kind of work can we get? What is your degree going to bring you? And how long is it going to take you to dig yourself out of that hole if everything goes wrong?” And so yeah, $10,000 to $30,000 was the average of what I was seeing. The most that I saw was, I think she had $96,000 of debt. And she had come to me with that debt.
David: Well, let’s talk a little bit about athlete chatter. If you’re coming home from the Games, is there ever any conversation among the athletes about top honors not being real gold?
Lauryn: Always.
David: I mean, are competitors even aware of that?
Lauryn: Yes. I remember learning, and I said, “Wait, what? It’s only gold plated? Wait, what does that mean? You mean the rest of it has something else inside of it? Well, what does it have in it?” And then I got home and I was like, “It’s not even real gold.” I was definitely let down when I learned that it wasn’t an actual gold medal, especially because I had seen on television people biting the medal and I thought that that was like, “Wow, what a cool thing. You have this big bar.” And like I said, I was raised in a time where gold was talked about a little bit more. I think it’s talked about a little bit less now as an asset or just like, “Wow, I’m going to get this thing that’s really valuable. I’m going to have my own gold bar in the shape of an Olympic medal.” That is really what I thought it was. And then I learned, they were like, “The silver medal is actually worth more because—
David: Amazing.
Lauryn: —it has more silver in it than the gold medal has [gold].” So I was like, “Oh, okay.”
David: That’s one of the reasons why we wanted to start this initiative with Vaulted, because we see the amount of work that goes into being one of the world’s greatest athletes. And we just want to honor that, want to recognize the time and talent and all that each individual athlete brings in terms of the honor and prestige to our country. And it seems a little cheap, frankly. That’s the way I feel. But I’d be interested in how you feel about that discovery process and what most athletes are like, “Oh, well, it’s not even real gold.”
Lauryn: Yeah. A little cheap is an understatement. There’s so much money that goes into the Olympic Games, so much sponsorship, so many different pools of income that come around the Olympic Games. And athletes have long been frustrated for not being compensated for the work that they do, and having to figure out sponsorships.
And like I said, even in America, we’re not one of those countries where we set the athlete for life. A lot of places, you get land or you get lifetime membership into the military, etc. And so it’s just frustrating in general that this is the world’s biggest stage to compete on for your sport, and you said that the thank you is something that has very little value at the end of the day. And so yeah, I wouldn’t even go so far as to say it’s cheap, I think it’s kind of disrespectful what they give us as the medal when it’s all said and done, because we know how much money is floating around.
Other people are being well compensated, executives and various sponsors and stuff are gaining from this. So if nothing else, if we will not be compensated, could you invest in giving us a medal that we could be proud of for a lifetime?
David: All right, so as a certified financial planner, as someone who looks at every asset class and says, “Okay, this is how you create a mix,” is physical gold something you’d actually advise athletes to hold?
Lauryn: Yeah. I’ve evolved as a planner. I was definitely hard no on the front end. I’ve just come from a very conservative background. I mentioned a little bit of my story with the financial planner, ended up with two very hardcore commission-based guys that sold me a bunch of products that I didn’t necessarily need. And so when I entered financial planning, I was pretty purist on low-cost investments and keeping things very simple, and knowing that investing was going to be a key piece of your puzzle to help your money grow, but not doing things that are super complicated. And so that evolution that has come around is thinking about what really diversity means, and understanding that in terms of what is going to be long-term. Cryptocurrency. I remember at the very beginning with bitcoin coming out, and I was just telling my clients, “No, absolutely not. No way, no how, stay away from it.”
And I know quite a few people that put everything they had into bitcoin. And while I’m still not a fan of that as a way to go about your investing strategy, if you got in on the very beginning of it in the same way that, like you said, we saw gold way back, once upon a time at a much lower rate than it is now, if you can hold your investments in general for a long term, you do generally get to see the benefit, reap the benefit of having patience and watching that investment grow over time.
David: Yeah. In the time that you’ve been an Olympic competitor and took the podium for the first time, you’re talking about a metal that was less than four digits, under $1,000. To now over $5,000. And the reality is it just keeps track with inflation, so it’s getting repriced gradually to reflect the loss of our purchasing power. And as such, it’s kind of a ballast asset within a portfolio.
I’m curious if you think the athletes that accept the gold from our initiative will keep it invested, sell it? What would you advise them to do based on current market conditions, recent trends, things like that?
Lauryn: I would definitely say keep. What a cool opportunity this is. What a great thing to be able to add to your portfolio, like you said, diversification happening without you having to be an investment guru. I think this is a really cool long-term opportunity that Vaulted is giving these athletes. But the reality is that, like I said, some will have to pay off their debt, and so turning it into cash and using it for purposes like that will happen.
I’d love to hear that every athlete talks to a financial person if they don’t have one before, and just say, “Hey, what’s the best thing to do? Maybe I could take a third of this and pay off debt. I could take a third of it and put it in a traditional investment account because I’ve never opened one before, and keep a third of it in gold,” or whatever is the best thing for that particular athlete.
But I think, like I said, based on where athletes are currently, while the needle is moving in the right direction, it has not moved enough that athletes are not going to want to take their cash and run. But we’ve got to encourage them. We’ve got to educate them to understand what a cool opportunity this is to be able to have this gold and to be able to, like you said, maybe 20 more years from now, see what that investment has grown to.
David: Well, I worked with gold my whole life, but my relationship with it is, I think, different than yours. When you think about the meaning of gold, both the symbol and as a financial asset, what does it represent to you personally? Do you see a difference between the symbol and the asset? What do you think would drive that?
Lauryn: I think, for me, the two are still kind of one and the same. Like I said, with the Olympics being such a big part of my life and that gold medal being the thing that you’re chasing, the actual asset—gold—represents achievement to me. It is a longstanding asset that has been around for pretty much forever. And once you’ve done something in the Olympic scape, there’s something that can’t be taken away from you. I will always be the first American woman to medal in the Summer and Winter Olympics. Whoever won the gold medal just recently in these games will always be the gold medalist for 2026. I had to think about what year we’re in.
And so the longevity of what it is that you have accomplished is kind of imprinted in whatever medal it is that you’ve earned. And like I said, in specifically the gold medal, in the same way that the longevity of gold and its value, like you said, it’s undisputable what’s happened over the course of time, and that it’s been here. It’s been a constant part of our lives and it’s been a great way to be able to diversify our portfolio. So I feel like they run synonymous along the same lines as far as their meaning and their importance in my life.
David: Yeah, I certainly see that with investors. It is a representation of real wealth, and it is a store of value through time. So in a different way, but a complementary way, it does mark their achievement, whether it’s in business or in just being diligent in their savings through time. It’s something that is a representation of the hard work and effort that they’ve put in. And that certainly is what that medal is supposed to be for you, a mark of achievement, an accolade, a mark of prestige in our country.
And just, thank you for representing us so well. What you did certainly accrues to your own legacy, but it’s one of those things that certainly is one of those things that as an American we’re so proud of. And every time I watch the Games, it just gives me chills. Every time we see one of our athletes take the stage, it’s something that’s like, “Yes, I’m proud to be an American.”
And it’s you that stirs those feelings of, “This is greatness and this is what we’re capable of.” Just the beginning. There’s so many more people out in culture who have these abilities, small percent that can compete with you, very few that would be the fastest woman in the world, but still it’s a representation of what can be done, what can be achieved. So I appreciate that.
Lauryn: I feel like it’s a representation of just, like you said, reaching your full potential. We get to take the main stage, but everybody can reach their full potential in whatever it is that they’re doing. You can be the best heart surgeon, you can be the best janitor, you can be the best school teacher and change a third grader’s life. And I think that’s what the Olympics inspires, but I think that’s what we all need to be striving for in life. What does it look like to be a gold medal person as far as reaching your full potential and contributing whatever you can to the world?
David: As one of the greatest American athletes of all time and a certified financial planner, what’s the one financial lesson you wish every athlete understood before stepping onto the world stage?
Lauryn: I think the most important piece of the puzzle is that all aspects of your finances work together. There’s no one piece that doesn’t affect another piece, and so you need to be looking at yourself in a holistic way. And that’s what I think more planners need to do. Like I said, we get so caught up in one piece of the puzzle, like, invest, invest, invest. But what about this debt we talked so much about today? What about those student loans? What about you want to buy a home? What about your kids’ 529 plan? Every little piece of the puzzle matters in the same way that we create a championship plan for ourselves to be able to compete. And it’s not just, “Run as fast as I can.”
I am a world-class sprinter, but I had to think about how I was eating. I had to think about how I was sleeping, when to travel, how many days to get there before, how much water to drink. Those things were all very, very important. When I was going to eat crazy amounts of dessert or things like that. Stress levels. How is your family treating you? All of it played a role in me being able to compete. In the same vein, all aspects of your finances are going to work together for you to be able to win at whatever your financial goals are.
We usually talk about financial goals in the realm of retirement, but that’s not the most important thing to a lot of athletes anymore, or not a lot of people. I say, “What does retirement mean?” and they’re like, “I love my job. I’m never going to quit. I’m planning for when I can’t work because you’re telling me to, Lauryn, but I hope that I can do this till I’m 90. I really love my work in that way.”
Or they want to go to part-time. They’ve never seen their parents retire. These words don’t mean the same thing as, like you said, traditionally they have been. And so creating a financial plan considering all the pieces of your puzzle is going to be the most important thing. And don’t be afraid to talk to somebody about what’s important to you because it is going to have some sort of financial implication, and you can build a plan that is customizable to whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish. And it doesn’t have to fit inside the box of what, like you said, all these benchmarks that the world throws at us.
David: I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you this question. How would you define success and how do you achieve it?
Lauryn: This is a very good question. I would say, for me, success is defined by feeling happy about what I’m doing. And so you’re doing things. Everybody has to do stuff on a day-to-day basis, but a lot of people describe it as like, “Can you sleep at night?” I want to go beyond just being able to sleep at night with the work that I’m doing. I want to feel excited about it. I want to feel invigorated by it. And getting up each and every day to be able to do something that I love and I’m able to pursue something that I love, to me is the success.
It’s not about being able to earn $1 billion, or $1 million even, for that matter. It’s about being able to make a meaningful difference and feeling excited when I hang up the phone. “Hey, I just talked to David today and some athlete might hear this podcast and actually change the way they think about money because of it.” I’m not saying yes to anything that’s not making me feel invigorated, not making me feel like I can share in a way that’s going to make an impact and ultimately make me feel happy. So to me, success equals happiness.
David: Do you think you can achieve that success without a degree of discipline?
Lauryn: Ooh. No. No, you cannot. No matter what it is, even if it’s something more intangible in the way that I’ve described, you’ve got to work to be happy. And so if happy is what I’m describing as success, there are things that are going to come up against you each and every day that could make me unhappy or threaten that happiness. I mentioned student loans being, like I said, part of my expertise. I really love that work because I can change somebody’s life in 60 minutes with what they did not understand about their student loan situation, and it makes me happy. But what happens if I’m not disciplined, I don’t understand what’s happening in student loans, I can make a mistake. I can cost people tens of thousands of dollars. And then the student loan system is changing on a regular basis. It’s very political and real humans are being tied up in that, and that doesn’t make me happy.
But I have to be able to reframe, instead of being frustrated about what politicians are doing, into saying, “What can I do to continue to make people happy?” And like I said, the work that I’m doing to untangle what is a very messy situation is what takes the discipline, the discipline to get up each and every day when you’re frustrated about a system that you can’t fix, a system that— It’s broken, to be quite frank. But I’m responsible for being disciplined if I want to be happy.
David: You have achieved a lot. And I’m curious as we wrap up our conversation today, what is the achievement that you’re most proud of?
Lauryn: This changes on such a regular basis. I’m sure if you would have asked me 18 months ago I probably would have said something different. But I am a new mom and I did not know I would be a mom. I was kind of in the boat of like, “This timeframe is probably come and gone,” and happy being the super aunt to my sister’s two little ones. And now I am momming and it has changed the way that I think about everything. There is someone else that is counting on me to inspire her, to teach her, to protect her. And each and every day she’s teaching me something. And I never would’ve thought that I would be in a position to just love this little thing so much. She’s so happy, but also sassy already at nine months. And yeah, I am incredibly, incredibly proud to be her mom.
David: Well, you’ve inspired us, and I don’t think you’ll have a hard time inspiring her. Thank you so much, Lauryn, for spending the time with us today and exploring your journey to becoming a world-class athlete. And we really appreciate your time.
Lauryn: Thank you for having me on the show, David.
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You’ve been listening to the McAlvany Weekly Commentary. I’m Kevin Orrick, along with David McAlvany, and I hope you enjoyed the interview with Lauryn Williams. You can find us at mcalvany.com and you can call us at 800-525-9556.
