Playing for his fifth NFL team in eight years, 28-year-old quarterback Sam Darnold is preparing to lead the Seattle Seahawks to a potential championship title in Super Bowl 60 on Sunday — a moment that’s required a high degree of mental resilience to reach, he told The Athletic on Friday.
Darnold’s career started with high expectations as the No. 3 draft pick in the 2018 NFL Draft. Instead, he lost more games than he won over his first three seasons, got traded and ultimately served as a backup quarterback for multiple teams over multiple years. He won a starting job with the Minnesota Vikings in 2024 after his primary competition for the role suffered a season-ending knee injury, and to many pundits’ surprise, led the Vikings to a 14-3 record that season.
His performance led to a three-year contract with Seattle worth $100.5 million in March. Now on the precipice of an NFL championship, Darnold says the resilient mindset he first learned from his parents helped him overcome his own mistakes and self-doubt to resurrect his career.
“My dad worked as a plumber, and my mom is a PE teacher, and it never mattered what kind of day they had. They were always consistent for me and my sister,” Darnold told The Athletic. “[It] didn’t matter what had happened at work; my dad was always out there playing catch with me afterwards. So, you know, I feel like I just naturally kind of learned to be resilient.”
DON’T MISS: How to build custom GPTs and use AI agents
Darnold still relies on his family to help him maintain a balanced mental state today, he said. “I would say my family is a huge part in just my ability to get over things when it’s bad, and they do a good job of keeping me grounded when things are good,” said Darnold.
Resilience is a key ingredient of success, psychologists agree: It helps us move on from mistakes while maintaining enough confidence to keep taking calculated risks. Teaching kids how to recover from failure and learn important lessons they can apply later on should be the goal of every parent who wants to raise mentally tough and resilient children, psychotherapist Amy Morin wrote for CNBC Make It in March 2021.
“The most accomplished people reached their goals by failing along the way,” Morin wrote. “Kids who do well later in life focus their attention on what went wrong and how they could fix it. They have growth mindsets that help them turn failures into positive learning experiences.”
A three-sentence mantra for resilience
Early in his career, Darnold dwelled too much on his mistakes, he told Fox Sports in an interview that aired on Jan. 30. He’d allow his on-field performance to disproportionately affect his mood and overall mental health, he said.
Reflecting on his parents’ longtime mindset helped inspire the mental shift that Darnold credits with helping turn his career around, he said. “Sometimes, mistakes happen and you learn from it,” he said. “And you don’t want to make the same mistakes again, but [if you have] a long career, those things are going to happen.”
Darnold also took inspiration from a quote from Jerry Rice, one of the greatest players in NFL history, he told The San Francisco Standard on Thursday.
“Jerry Rice said that he never had a perfect practice or a perfect game,” said Darnold. “That’s the mindset I try to have. It’s not always going to be perfect, [but] it’s about how can you move on from mistakes to continue to better the team and better yourself.”
Now, rather than dwelling on mistakes — which are bound to happen, in some way — Darnold tries “to flush bad plays, flush bad games” from his memory and move on with his positive attitude intact, he told The Athletic.
When things don’t work out the way he’d planned, he turns to a mantra for resilience, he said: “‘That happens. It’s football. We’re not always going to be perfect.'”
Want to get ahead at work with AI? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course, Beyond the Basics: How to Use AI to Supercharge Your Work. Learn advanced AI skills like building custom GPTs and using AI agents to boost your productivity today.
