Wired Early: What Growing Up a Seahawks Fan Taught Me About the Long Game (Copy)

There are some things in life you choose, and others that are wired into you before you understand what choice even means.

This picture of my little brother and me is proof of that. We are kids, wearing matching Seahawks gear, grinning like we already belong to something bigger than ourselves. There is no irony in the photo. No self-awareness. Just pure, unquestioned fandom.

Being a Seahawks fan is not something I picked up later in life. It was never a phase or a preference. It was baked in.

My family has held season tickets since the inaugural season. I have family members who worked for the organization going back to the 1970s. Long before the Seahawks were relevant nationally, before championships or prime-time respect, they were simply part of our family story.

By the time I reached college, I had season tickets of my own. What started as inheritance turned into commitment.

Over the years, that commitment turned into miles. I followed the team everywhere. Nearby trips to San Francisco. Long-haul travel all the way to Germany. Cold losses. Loud wins. Seasons that ended too early and seasons that lingered longer than expected.

That kind of loyalty does something to you. It shapes how you think about success, patience, and identity.

Which is why a Super Bowl run always hits a little differently for me.

Not just because of what it represents in the moment, but because of everything stacked underneath it.

When you zoom out, fandom looks a lot like a career.

There are seasons, and those seasons are not evenly distributed or fairly timed. There are years when you are developing, learning systems, finding your footing, and making mistakes in full view of others. There are years when you are grinding, showing up every day without much external validation, trusting that the work will matter eventually.

Then there are years when you are on top. Things click. Results show up. People assume you were always destined to be there. And finally, there are rebuilding years. The ones no one celebrates. The ones where you keep things together publicly while privately wondering whether you still belong.

Sports fans understand this intuitively. Careers often teach it more slowly.

What carries you through all of it is not the wins alone.

Wins are moments. They are bright and fleeting. What sustains you is dedication to the craft. The willingness to get better even when progress is invisible. The discipline to sharpen skills that compound slowly over time. And the people around you who make the work worth doing, even when the outcomes are uncertain.

That is true in football. It is even more true in a career.

The highs feel sweeter when you remember the lows. Celebrations carry more meaning when you respect the building blocks beneath them. The pain points are not detours from the journey. They are tuition. You pay in time, effort, doubt, and repetition. In return, you gain judgment, resilience, and perspective.

Growing up a Seahawks fan trained me for that reality long before I had language for it.

This franchise did not arrive fully formed. There were long stretches of mediocrity, irrelevance, and frustration. There were seasons where hope felt optional. Years where the rest of the league barely noticed what was happening in the Pacific Northwest.

And yet, people showed up anyway.

They showed up because identity is not built on outcomes alone. It is built on consistency. On belonging. On believing in something through cycles of success and failure.

That lesson has echoed through my professional life more times than I can count.

Careers, like teams, are rarely linear. The roles change. The expectations shift. The environment evolves. Sometimes you are the rookie trying to prove you belong. Sometimes you are the veteran adapting to a new system. Sometimes you are the leader holding things together while others find their footing.

What matters is not whether every season is a winning one. What matters is whether you stay committed to the work and the people around you.

That commitment has become even more tangible as I have gotten older and begun watching the game through a different lens.

Now, I sit in those same season tickets with my son. We have gone to games together all year as he has gotten into football. For him, this season is about discovery. Learning the rules. Recognizing the players. Understanding what it feels like to care deeply about something outside of himself.

For me, it is layered.

I am watching him experience something I once experienced with my own family, while also carrying the full weight of what came before. The losing seasons. The near misses. The moments that shaped my appreciation long before championships ever entered the conversation.

He does not need that history yet. His experience is clean. Immediate. Unburdened.

And that is exactly as it should be.

Perspective changes with time. When you are young, success feels like the goal. When you are older, meaning becomes the prize.

That shift shows up in careers as well. Early in your professional life, you chase milestones. Titles. Recognition. Validation. Over time, you begin to value something else entirely. Mastery. Integrity. The quality of the relationships you build along the way.

You realize that being “on top” is not a permanent state. It is a season. And like all seasons, it passes.

What lasts is who you become during the process.

Being a Seahawks fan taught me that before I ever entered the workforce. It taught me patience. It taught me humility. It taught me how to stay invested when results lag behind effort.

Those lessons show up now in how I approach leadership and work.

I am less impressed by quick wins than I used to be. More attentive to consistency. More interested in how people behave during rebuilding years than how they celebrate during peak moments.

Because anyone can show up when things are going well. It takes something different to stay engaged when they are not.

That is why Super Bowl runs matter, but they are not the whole story. They are punctuation, not the paragraph.

The paragraph is built from all the seasons that came before. The early mornings. The hard lessons. The years when progress was incremental and invisible.

When you understand that, you stop rushing through success. You learn to sit with it. To acknowledge what it took to arrive there. To recognize the people and moments that made it possible.

That is true whether you are talking about football or a career.

The older I get, the more I appreciate that the journey is not something you endure to reach the destination. It is the substance of the experience itself.

The wins are better when you remember the work. The celebrations feel deeper when you respect the process. And the setbacks make sense when you see them as part of the education, not a sign you took a wrong turn.

That picture of my brother and me still makes me smile. Not because of what we knew then, but because of what we did not. We were already committed, long before outcomes could reward us for it.

Some things really are wired early.

And if you are lucky, they keep teaching you long after you think you have moved on.

Go Hawks.