The Seattle Seahawks just triumphed over the New England Patriots in the LX Super Bowl, taking home the Lombardi Trophy after a 29-13 victory this past Sunday. The team’s coach, Mike Macdonald, led his players to victory at just 38 years old—and it’s all thanks to an early career gamble.
Macdonald had graduated from the University of Georgia with a master’s degree in sports management, and he was at a crossroads. His four-year stint working for the college’s football team, the Bulldogs, was coming to a close. Despite loving football (and like many graduates before him), he chased a stable career and landed a job offer at Big Four global accounting firm KPMG at the end of 2013.
“It felt like it was time, that there wasn’t anything that was going to come up,” Macdonald told The Athletic in 2022. “So I was kind of like, ‘OK, I guess I’ll go make some money.’ I signed a contract and everything.”
But then one phone call changed everything.
The former special teams coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens, Jerry Rosburg, gave Macdonald a ring and offered him a coaching internship ahead of the upcoming 2014 football season. Macdonald said he was conflicted over taking a shot at his dream career or pursuing a comfortable corporate career with a steady ladder; after all, entry-level KPMG jobs can pay up to $97,000, while an NFL intern only makes up to around $61,000.
The KPMG recruiter warned he’d never be welcomed back as an employee if he declined the job offer. Even his dad told him to stay in finance.
“I toiled over it for a little bit,” Macdonald said in a Baltimore Ravens cover story. “But I ended up just being like, ‘What are you doing? This is where your heart is at. If you’re 40 years old and you didn’t give it a shot, you’re not going to be able to live with yourself.’” And now, his decision is paying off in front of millions of fans.
Macdonald’s 12-year rise to his Super Bowl victory
Macdonald spent most of his 20s and early 30s at the Baltimore Ravens; stepping in as an intern in 2014, he quickly worked his way up to defensive assistant coach less than one year later, and trained the Maryland team’s defensive backs and linebackers.
After breaking away for one year to lead the University of Michigan’s defense, he returned in 2022 and became the Ravens’ defensive coordinator at just 34 years old—the youngest in the sport.
“To me, age is just a number,” Macdonald told The Athletic in 2022, right after assuming the role. “I don’t care if it’s a low number or a high number. It’s a number. It’s what you bring and what you contribute and how you do the job.”
After eight years with the Ravens, Macdonald finally scored the top job—but this time, for a new team on the other side of the country. Uprooting his life from Maryland, he headed to Washington state to become the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks.
And his strategic chops clearly helped pull the team’s recent Super Bowl victory; in an impressive defensive gameplay, the Seahawks reigned supreme.
In only two seasons of leading the team, and at only 38 years old, Macdonald proved he was meant for football instead of finance.
Successful people who ditched stable careers
It’s not just Mcdonald who sacrificed a high-paying career to find fulfillment.
Mette Lykke, the CEO of Too Good To Go, started her career as a McKinsey consultant, but couldn’t ignore the pull towards entrepreneurship. Luckily, she wasn’t the only one feeling restless; she and two of her Big Four colleagues all quit on the same day, and banded together to launch their first business, a fitness community app called Endomondo. She eventually sold the business to Under Armour for $85 million in 2015.
“A lot of aspiring entrepreneurs are just sitting there in their corporate jobs waiting for that lightning moment when they have the great idea,” Lykke told Fortune in 2023. Then she adds a warning: “It’s not going to land in your lap, you just decide to go for it or you don’t. Once you decide to go for it, you will come up with something because you have to.”
Alexis Ohanian, the cofounder of Reddit, also ditched a stable career to pursue his true calling.
As a 19-year-old student at the University of Virginia in 2005, he already had his career sketched out: Ohanian would take the law school admission test (LSAT), spend another three years in school, and land a high-paying legal job. But just 20 minutes into taking the LSAT, he had a revelation.
“So I’d walked out of the LSAT. I had studied for it, I was getting ready for it,” Ohanian revealed on Wired’s Uncanny Valley podcast last year. “And then 20 minutes into it, I walked out. I went to a Waffle House and decided I was just gonna invent a career and be an entrepreneur.”
Two decades later, Reddit has over 100 million daily active users, and boasts a market cap of $28 billion.
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