Macdonald 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 football team, the Bulldogs, is coming to an end. Despite loving football (and like many graduates before him), he pursued a solid career and got a job offer at a Big Four global accounting firm. KPMG at the end of 2013.

“Feels like it’s time, with nothing coming,” Macdonald SPOKE The Athletic in 2022. “So I was like, ‘OK, maybe I’ll go make some money.’ I signed a contract and everything.”

But one phone call changed everything.

Former special teams coordinator for the Baltimore Ravens, Jerry Rosburg, gave Macdonald a ring and offered him a coaching internship before the upcoming 2014 football season. Macdonald said he was conflicted between taking a shot at his dream career or pursuing a comfortable corporate career with a steady ladder; after all, entry-level KPMG jobs pay to $97,000while an NFL intern does only the about $61,000.

The KPMG recruiter warned that he would not be accepted back as an employee if he refused the job offer. Even his father told him to stay financially.

“I’ve been working on it for a while,” Macdonald said in a The Baltimore Ravens cover story. “But in the end I was like, ‘What are you doing? This is where your heart is. If you’re 40 years old and you don’t do this, you can’t live on your own.'” 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 with the Baltimore Ravens; entering as an intern in 2014, he quickly worked his way to defensive assistant coach less than a year later, and trained the defensive backs and linebackers on the Maryland team.

After taking a year off to lead the defense at the University of Michigan, he returned in 2022 and became the Ravens’ defensive coordinator at age 34 — the youngest in the game.

“For me, age is just a number,” Macdonald SPOKE The Athletic in 2022, after assuming the role. “I don’t care if it’s a small 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 went to the state of Washington to become the head coach of Seattle Seahawks.

And his strategic chops clearly helped pull the team to a recent Super Bowl victory; in an impressive defensive game, the Seahawks reigned supreme.

In just two seasons at the helm of the team, and at the age of 38, Macdonald has proven that he is for football rather than finance.

Successful people who leave stable careers

Mcdonald isn’t the only one to sacrifice a high-paying career to find contentment.

Mette Lykke, the CEO of Very Good Goingbegan his career as a McKinsey consultant, but cannot ignore the pull towards entrepreneurship. Fortunately, he wasn’t the only one feeling restless; he and two of his Big Four partners all quit on the same day, and joined together to launch their first business, a fitness community app called Endomondo. He eventually sold the business to Under Armor for $85 million in 2015.

“Many aspiring entrepreneurs are just sitting there at their corporate jobs waiting for that lightning bolt moment when they have a great idea,” Lykke SPOKE luck in 2023. Then he added a warning: “It won’t land in your lap, you just decide to do it or not. Once you decide to go for it, you can have something because you have to.”

Alexis Ohanianthe cofounder of Reddit, also removed a solid 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 walked out on the LSAT. I studied for it, I prepared for it,” Ohanian revealed to Wired’s Uncanny Valley podcast last year. “And after 20 minutes, I walked out. I went to a Waffle House and decided I was just going to 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.