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“Man, what happened to Russ?”
For a stretch there, you could walk into any sports pub in Seattle and hear that question.
The once-mobile QB seemed to have lost a step. Packed on a few pounds. And the plays—the scrambles, the inadvisable spins and jukes that just seemed to work years before, the ones that made him a household name and an All-Pro—had dwindled.
As his play trended down, his antics off the field ticked up. It made you wonder if his head was on the game or on the fame.
Off to Denver he went. Then Pittsburgh. Then New York. Social media stayed chock full of cringey moments from the former All-Pro and his wife, Ciara. And because his play was in decline, and because of all those cringeworthy moments, losing him hurt just a little bit less.
But before anyone was asking “What happened to Russ?” they were yelling something else to anyone within earshot:
“Let Russ cook!”
Let him do his thing. As inadvisable as it looked. Because it just seemed to work. You’d shake your head, thank baby Jesus, and high-five your buddies.
Russell Wilson announced his retirement from the NFL. We’ll play this season without him on the sidelines.
Like a lot of athletes, the announcement came a few years too late. But instead of relitigating every vomit-inducing moment of the last few seasons, I want to go back to something Wilson taught me in his early days here in Seattle.
Super Bowl XLIX. Second-and-goal. Wilson throws a pick. Malcolm Butler jumped the route. Game over.
The announcers, along with 98% of fans were all asking the same question. Why the hell didn’t they hand it off to Marshawn Lynch?
And with the weeks of conversation and analysis that followed, a lot of fans got their first real lesson in resulting—judging a decision’s quality based only on its result.
Jump off a bridge, survive, and think to yourself, wow, I’m a flippin’ genius.
The pass, as it turns out, was a pretty good call. It just didn’t work.
But my Wilson lesson came earlier. Before any of the Super Bowls. It was the very first interview I heard after we drafted him.
Asked how he evades tacklers, he didn’t talk about training. Or practice. Or agility drills.
He talked about the Regency Square Mall in Richmond, Virginia.
Eight years old, Wilson was bobbing and weaving through the busy corridors, past Cinnabon and Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, with his eyes up—not on the people in his way, but on the gaps. Spinning, juking, reading the flow. Feeling for lanes as they opened and closed.
And in his head, he wasn’t at the mall. He was outside, on the field, playing ball.
Visualization is doing mentally what you do physically.
It’s what a kid does in the driveway, down by one, clock ticking.
10… 9… 8…
That buzzer-beater over Charles Oakley or Dikembe Mutombo? That’s visualization. Imagining the thing before it happens—if it ever happens. And these mental reps have a beautiful property: not only do they work, they’re infinite.
“I’m a person that visualizes all of the time,” Wilson said. “I started doing that at a young age… growing up watching Allen Iverson and Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan, they used to always talk about visualizing. So that’s something I’ve always worked on ever since I was younger.”
Kobe took it further. In The Mamba Mentality he wrote that film study stopped being about what happened and started being about “what was missing and should have been there.” Imagining the alternatives. The counters. The play that could have been.
That reframed film for me. I’d always thought of it as a way to catch mistakes—and it is that. But it’s also a canvas. Not just what you should have done but what you could have done.
Jack Nicklaus did it like a film editor. “I never hit a shot,” he wrote in Golf My Way, “even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head. It’s like a color movie. First, I ‘see’ the ball where I want it to finish . . . Then I ‘see’ it going there. Then there’s a sort of fade-out, and the next scene shows me making the swing that will turn those images into reality.”
Aaron Rodgers told USA today, “In sixth grade, a coach taught us about the importance of visualization. When I’m in a meeting, watching film or laying in bed before I go to sleep, I always visualize making those plays. I visualized the majority before I made them.”
And if you ever caught Wilson during pregame, you saw the grown-up version of that driveway kid. Beats headphones, shorts, tank top, nobody else around—running plays by himself on an empty field. Breaking the huddle. Calling audibles. Hitting receivers who weren’t there. Dodging tacklers who weren’t there. Occasionally, but only occasionally, handing off to a phantom Marshawn Lynch.
Even hushing a crowd at a goal line that only existed in his head.
It looked, frankly, a little crazy.
He was visualizing.
He’d even scout the buildings. “I haven’t been to Jacksonville, haven’t played there before, so I look up pictures of the stadium and try to visualize what things look like, where the play clock is—all those things, just so I can be comfortable before I even get there.”
Comfort is key. To have “been there, done that” when, in fact, you have not—that’s an edge. It lets you relax and play loose when the moment arrives. Especially, Wilson said, in the red zone, where everything happens faster and you’ve got no time to think.
So does this stuff work?
Probably.
Back in 1943, three psychologists—Vandell, Davis, and Clugston—tested this on students throwing darts and shooting free throws: some practiced for real, some did nothing, and some practiced only in their heads. The kids who practiced in their heads, using only their imagination, improved nearly as much as those who practiced in the physical world.
It was a small study, but the effect was real. And it’s been confirmed. A 2020 meta-analysis took decades of research on mental practice and concluded that mental reps give a legitimate bump in performance.
From big presentations to Olympic swimming to Formula 1, people are visualizing, imagining, and seeing the benefit.
Much of this has been discussed in Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics. Maltz writes, “Our brain and nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real experience, and one that is vividly imagined.”
Maltz gives examples:
Tell a hypnotized subject he’s standing at the North Pole and he’ll begin to shiver.
Tell him your finger is a red-hot poker and his body may respond as though he’s been burned.
Then things get stranger.
Ask fully awake college students to imagine one hand submerged in ice water and its temperature drops.
Ask them to imagine a warm spot on their forehead and the temperature rises.
Maltz’s conclusion was that the nervous system often responds not only to reality, but to vividly imagined reality.
“Your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination,” Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett writes. And it’s “constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain.”
So what will you construct?
Napoleon Hill used his imagination a different way.
In search of mentors he could never get to in real life, he studied the most successful men in the world and came up with nine men that resonated with him. Emerson, Paine, Edison, Darwin, Lincoln, Burbank, Napoleon, Ford, and Carnegie.
In Think and Grow Rich he writes, “I followed the habit of reshaping my own character, by trying to imitate the nine men whose lives and life-works had been most impressive to me.”
But he went well beyond learning about these men. He began to meet with them, in his imagination.
“Every night, over a long period of years, I held an imaginary Council meeting with this group whom I called my ‘Invisible Counselors.’ Just before going to sleep at night, I would shut my eyes, and see, in my imagination, this group of men seated with me around my Council Table.”
We already do a version of this.
Luke talked to Obi-Wan. Maverick talked to Goose. We quote Jesus and the Buddha, we cite dead presidents and generals, we mimic the stars we grew up watching. We’ve all got invisible counselors.
Composing A Christmas Carol, he later told a friend, he “wept, and laughed, and wept again,” and “walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles, many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed”—so possessed by Scrooge and Tiny Tim they felt more real than the people in the room. The critic G.H. Lewes marveled that in “no other perfectly sane mind” had he seen imagination come “so closely to hallucination.”
You might push back—“I don’t know what they’d actually say.” But for the people you truly admire, you do.
“Wait till your father gets home” only works as a threat because you already know exactly what your father is going to say.
I’ve never met Warren Buffett but I sure as shit know what he’d tell me to do with my money: low-cost, S&P 500 index fund. But when I’m logged into my brokerage account, staring at the latest IPO going to the moon—can I hear Buffett? Or is he drowned out by the other voice in my head, the one promising a 100x return?
Fictional conversations can be surprisingly powerful. But you’ve got to pick the right story.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz admitted he couldn’t actually give the Scarecrow a brain, the Tin Man a heart, or the Lion courage.
“I’m really a very good man,” he tells Dorothy, “but I’m a very bad Wizard.”
Yet somehow the Scarecrow became wiser, the Lion braver, and the Tin Man kinder anyway.
The Wizard hadn’t changed them. Didn’t give them anything they didn’t already have.
His power was imagined. But did that mean it wasn’t real?
Wilson’s mental coach, Trevor Moawad, liked to say the past is real, but not predictive.
That’s easy to forget.
We all carry around a running list of our mistakes, embarrassments, failures, and near misses. We replay them, ruminate, and it seems as though those outcomes are all but assured.
But memory only tells you what happened.
Imagination tells you what might happen next.
The last few years of Wilson’s career were messy. There was plenty of cringe. The magic eventually ran out, as it does for every athlete.
But I’ll remember the quarterback running imaginary plays before games. Throwing passes to receivers who weren’t there. Escaping defenders who didn’t exist yet.
How could I forget?
And I’ll remember how it started. The kid sprinting through a Virginia shopping mall, eyes up, searching for openings nobody else could see.
Can you imagine that? I sure can.
Visualization won’t make you a Super Bowl champion. It won’t make you Kobe Bryant or Aaron Rodgers. It won’t turn a late-round prospect into a Hall of Famer. Not on its own.
But it can do something almost as valuable.
It can make the unfamiliar feel familiar. Rehearsed.
It can assemble a board of directors, in your mind’s eye, across time.
It can help you arrive at a moment believing you’ve been there before.
In First Things First, Stephen Covey suggests we “live out of our imagination instead of our memory.”
Russell Wilson spent his career doing exactly that.
Long before he escaped the rush, he escaped it in his head.
Long before he made the play, he imagined the play.
And long before he arrived, he’d already been there.
Imagine that.
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