MJ vs Prince & the Power of Rivalry
“Competition…breeds higher effort” – Michael Jackson
Every spring in New York City, renowned hip-hop figure DJ Spinna throws a “Prince vs. Michael Jackson” party, a sold-out war of records that has become so popular in the past decade it has spread to nightclubs in San Francisco, Toronto and Tokyo. Throughout the night, fans dance to songs by each artist, building to the dizzying crescendo when the drums and chanting of Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin” sound like a war call and Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” rallies like a summon to arms. And for the thousands of followers who may never revel inside a DJ Spinna party, the debate rages online in countless forums dedicated to the question: who is better, Michael Jackson or Prince?
The rivalry that has been playing out around the world doesn’t only exist in the minds of Prince and Jackson’s devotees, it raged in Michael Jackson’s mind for years. In the 1980s, Michael Jackson commanded the spotlight as the biggest pop superstar in the world, yet he consistently courted showdowns with Prince. Jackson’s radically different approach to his biggest competitor gives us insight into the mind of a legend. Any star wants to prove he is good, but an icon wants to prove he is better.
It was Jackson’s self-imposed struggle for supremacy over Prince that inspired the concept of Bad, incited him to outwork and out-create his peers, and impelled Jackson’s final act–his This Is It concerts. Similarly, Prince looked to Jackson as a source of competitive and creative fuel, resulting in one of the greatest periods of artistic genius in music history.
A knife can’t get sharper on its own. Overwhelming evidence from not just Jackson’s career, but other high achievers as well as mounting psychological research proves that cultivating an intense rivalry can drive you to greater creativity and performance. This essay will show you why adversaries are so viscerally motivating, and constructive ways you can harness the power of rivalry to not only beat your nemesis, but anyone else in your path.
The public perceives Michael Jackson as a docile, soft-spoken, childlike man who saved his ferocity for the stage–yet people in his inner circle have a different take. “I know most people don’t think of me as tough or strong-willed,” Jackson once said, “but that’s just because they don’t know me.“ Jackson songwriter and collaborator Teron Beal echoed this sentiment, “I always got the feeling that if a fight were to break out in the studio, Michael could hold his own.”
It’s no wonder. As a young man, Jackson’s father Joe competed as a boxer and Golden Gloves contender, and instilled an aggressive spirit in his sons, teaching them to never back down from a fair contest. And in the world of boxing, a fighter may have many potential competitors, yet there is only one adversary in the ring–one person you are facing down for the championship. In Prince, Michael Jackson found his ultimate sparring partner.
Prince first hit Michael Jackson’s radar in the late 1970s. Cynthia Horner, the editor of the teen magazine Right On!, which often filled its pages with pull-out posters of Jackson, recalled to Vibe Magazine, “I would give Michael copies of the magazines and he would see certain people in the book and ask me lots of questions about the artists he was interested in. And that’s how he was introduced to Prince. After that, I started to let Michael listen to some of the Prince music I had and he was intrigued. At that point, I realized that there was somewhat of a rivalry developing…He didn’t want to get replaced by the newcomer.” At that time, Prince was a cult artist; his 1978 debut album For You barely scraped the Billboard charts and even though his 1979 follow-up Prince spawned the #1 R&B hit “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” Jackson’s Off the Wall far eclipsed it in commercial success.
Yet Jackson’s concerns about Prince were prescient: by August of 1983, Prince was catching up and neither Jackson nor his musical team could ignore him. Jackson’s brother Tito told Vibe, “Sure, my brothers and I listened to Prince…‘1999,’ ‘Little Red Corvette,’ ‘When Doves Cry.’”
Prince’s music even infiltrated the Thriller recording sessions when Quincy Jones played “1999” as an example of a killer chord sequence. The world was catching on as well–Prince’s album 1999 hit the Billboard top 10 and his video for “Little Red Corvette” sped through the doors that Jackson’s “Billie Jean” blew open to become one of the few videos by an African-American artist to enjoy heavy airplay on MTV. Jackson still had the edge, though. By the summer of 1983, Michael Jackson was quickly becoming the biggest pop star in the world. Thriller had just completed a staggering 19-week run atop the Billboard albums chart and Jackson was still gliding off his stunning appearance on “Motown 25” where he unleashed the moonwalk and he was planning his next move–a 14-minute music video for “Thriller.”
Unlike the average artist who might cocoon himself in success and ignore the interloper, Jackson did as his father taught him. Jackson knew that the only way to truly become a champion is to face your ultimate adversary one on one–and win.
This is an idea many of us subscribe to as well. We want our heroes to earn their championships through direct contest and combat–no shortcuts, no sideroads. This is the reason so many sports fans chided Lebron James for leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers for the perfectly packaged Miami Heat or why boxing enthusiasts gunned for Floyd Mayweather, Jr. to finally square off with his biggest competitor Manny Pacquiao. Michael Jackson understood this too, and throughout his career, Jackson invited Prince into the ring to prove to the world who was better, and it started one summer night in 1983.
Michael Jackson and Prince had many things in common, and their idolization of James Brown was one of the most predominant. Jackson called Brown “my greatest inspiration” and often recounted that watching James Brown perform on television was how he knew he wanted to be an entertainer. Prince has always acknowledged the major influence of James Brown on his style and says one of the pivotal moments of his childhood was the night his stepfather put him on stage to dance a few beats with Brown. Even if Jackson and Prince had never publicly confessed their adulation of James Brown, anyone watching their funk-fueled performances, frenetic footwork and rhythmic outbursts could see that they both channel the Godfather of Soul.
It was not surprising then, that it would be James Brown who would bring together these two sides of music royalty. On the night of August 20, 1983, Michael Jackson and Prince were under the same roof at the same time, at Los Angeles’s Beverly Theater for a James Brown concert. In the middle of his set, the Godfather took a breather and in a classic James Brown-ism announced: "We got another fantastic people for you. He’s too much to be a person; he’s just a people.” Brown explained that this “people” was “a new inspiration, a new motivation” for him and called up from the audience a young man who was just days shy of his 25th birthday, “little Michael Jackson.”
Jackson, in shades, waved from the crowd and humbly blew kisses to the stage. In the midst of Brown’s relentless goading, “You gotta come up and say something! You gotta come up and say something!” Jackson maneuvered through the crowd. When Jackson was on stage, he grabbed Brown’s microphone and growled “I love you” over the band’s simmering breakdown. Then, Brown’s band exploded into a boiling groove, and on-cue Jackson responded, scrambling his feet like Brown’s star student. He twirled like a tornado, and then reset to unleash what had become the most talked-about dance move in the world–the moonwalk. It was a masterful mini-performance and the audience hailed applause on him. Brown smiled like a proud father.
Yet for Jackson, soaking up the spotlight on James Brown’s stage wasn’t enough, elucidating one critical element that separates the good from the great; the popular from the iconic: when the spotlight is on you, prove you earn it. Jackson hugged Brown, then leaned in and whispered in his ear, “Hey, bring Prince up.”
Brown threw his head back and laughed incredulously. Jackson leaned in again whispering in Brown’s ear again–six times in total. Finally Brown grabbed the mic and pointed to Jackson on the side of the stage, “Give him a big round of applause because he just insisted that I introduce Prince.”
Jackson had literally set the stage for a sibling rivalry, so the two Godsons of Soul could prove to papa, the Godfather of their style, which brother was best. The theater had become his boxing ring. “Prince? Prince!” Brown peered into the crowd looking for the diminutive artist, and found him towards the far right side of the audience. Instead of walking to the stage like Jackson, Prince rode piggyback on the shoulders of a white-haired, Santa Claus-looking fellow, and ripped off his gloves and threw them into the crowd. (Someone in the audience hurled one of the gloves right back at him.) The slight didn’t fluster Prince, and once on stage, he hugged Brown who laid down the gauntlet, “You gotta do something.” Prince began by reaching for a band member’s guitar. It was a left-handed guitar though, so the right-handed Prince fumbled with it, then gyrated, and ultimately tore both his shirt and the guitar from his chest. He then danced with the mic stand which looked like a stiff, unwilling partner, and then squealed into the microphone. He ran off the stage so fast he accidentally toppled a prop lamp.
On the way back to his hotel that night, Prince was reportedly silent–even more so than usual. Prince’s former tour manager Alan Leeds speculated to Vibe that Jackson had an ulterior motive for asking Brown to summon Prince. “Now I always wondered if Michael intentionally brought Prince up to put him in that position just to say, ‘Hey, you think you’re on my ass? Well follow this, motherfucker.’”
Months after the James Brown night, Prince sat at home viewing the 1984 Grammys, where Michael Jackson ascended the stage time and time again to accept an unprecedented 8 awards. As for Prince, he was dividing his time between the watching the show and footage of a film he had been shooting. Prince’s drummer Bobby Z said, “We were watching rough cuts of ‘Purple Rain’ and we knew that’s where Prince wanted to be the next year….Prince had a deep-seated competitive nature, so it’s easy to see where he would measure himself against Jackson’s success.” The inspiration carried Prince through to the next Grammy ceremony, where Prince and the Revolution won Best Rock Vocal by a Group for “Purple Rain” and earned an Album of the Year nomination. With Purple Rain, Prince accomplished a rare triple threat: the number one album, single and film in the country. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that Prince saw Michael as a symbol of where he wanted to go in terms [of notoriety]. Michael was one of the few artists on the planet that Prince did respect in that sense,” Leeds observed.
And Prince indeed followed Jackson. Later that year, Prince flew his production and lighting designer to Dallas to study the staging of The Jacksons’ Victory tour. Dallas was just the second of 19 cities in the tour, and Prince wanted an early look at the stage that took crews four months to construct. The stage was ambitious, including a riser of steps which elevated through the stage. Yet Prince noted that the brothers’ tour omitted the latest computerized lighting technology. There he found an “in,” a place where he could beat Jackson and determined to fill the void in his upcoming shows. Prince set his show apart with purple smoke and swirling spotlights to highlight props such as onstage bathtub. The Washington Post hailed Prince’s concert as “one of the first [sets] to make effective use of wind machines.” Jackson saw the show in person when he attended Prince’s Purple Rain dates in Inglewood, California.
With the success of Purple Rain, Prince had now joined Jackson as one of the biggest male solo superstars on the planet. In fact, a Newsweek cover story about Prince that year called Michael Jackson Prince’s “only real competition.” And just as Jackson did that night at the James Brown concert, he wanted Prince on stage with him again. In 1985, Jackson and Jones had a power lunch with Prince to invite him to sing on “We Are the World,” a song that Jackson co-wrote with Lionel Richie to raise money for the USA for Africa. Inviting Prince to participate in “We Are the World” was certainly part of the song’s democratic, magnanimous spirit, yet maybe as Leeds suspected at the ‘83 James Brown show, Jackson may have also had a secret motive. Having his rival sing a song that he co-wrote wrote would have also been a power move for Jackson. Prince didn’t take the bait. He was one of the only popular artists who failed to show for the event. Saturday Night Live later ridiculed Prince’s absence from the session in a skit in which Billy Crystal plays an ego-maniacal Prince who sings his own version of “We Are the World” with a less charitable chorus– “I am also the world, I am also the children.” In real life, Prince instead offered his own composition, the little known “4 The Tears In Your Eyes,” for the full We Are the World soundtrack.
Prince blowing off the “We Are the World” session didn’t deter Jackson. The rivalry was foremost in his mind when he wrote the title track to his next album, the all-important follow-up to Thriller. “’Bad’ was conceived…to do a duet with Prince,” Quincy Jones revealed in his autobiography. The song’s lyrics set up a showdown between two adversaries, where Prince and Jackson would trade barbs like “Your talk is cheap” and “you’re not a man” and threats to “hurt your mind” and “show your stuff or let it be.”
Even the title of the song was a direct dig at Prince. The same 1985 Newsweek feature that posited Michael Jackson as Prince’s only real competition hailed Prince as “his Royal badness,” which was Prince’s prevailing nickname at that time. Prince at that time was pretty bad–he had earned his moniker. His song “Darling Nikki” so disturbed Tipper Gore that she responded by launching the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) which slaps “Parental Advisory” stickers on offending albums. Although Jackson would never go as far to croon about a girl “sitting in a hotel lobby masturbating behind a magazine,” Prince’s overtly sexual image, along with Madonna’s unapologetic Like a Virgin “threatened to make Michael Jackson look tame in comparison,” notes Joseph Vogel notes in the book Man in the Music. “[Jackson] wanted Bad to be tougher and edgier than Thriller.” Now that Prince was battling Jackson for pop music supremacy, Jackson wanted some of that bad boy edge for himself. For his Bad album cover art, Jackson traded in the smooth white suit and cursive font of the Thriller cover for a black, military-inspired jacket and the album title scrawled in red graffiti.
“Bad” would be a proving ground, another boxing ring. But this time, the audience would be much larger than the one at the James Brown show in L.A. Jackson wanted them to square off on the same song to finally settle the question: “so the whole world has to answer right now to tell you once again, who’s bad?”
As a “battle song,” “Bad” would have been in good company. Jackson had a history of recording them with great artists. Jackson wrote “The Girl Is Mine” with Paul McCartney about two guys fighting over the same girl. The Bad song “Just Good Friends” is a reprisal of that idea, where Jackson warns his duet partner Stevie Wonder “We’ve got a problem here.” Recording with the top male vocalists of his time, including Mick Jagger on Victory’s “State of Shock” and Freddie Mercury (on the demo of “State of Shock”), was Jackson’s way of not just attracting his collaborator’s fan bases, but proving to the world that he could indeed hold his own with the best of them.
Jones set up another meeting between the two titans for Jackson to formally pitch the song to Prince. Once again, Prince declined. “You don’t need me to be on this, it’ll be a hit without me,” he told Jackson’s team. In an interview years later, Prince intimated he was picking up on what Jackson was putting down with the song. “Michael wasn’t going to sing ‘your butt is mine’ to me,’” Prince said.
Jackson tried to coax Prince into the ring one more time in 1996 – and although Prince and Jackson never did collaborate, he held Prince as a benchmark of creativity, up until his death. When Eddie Murphy raised the topic of Prince on the set of their music video “Whatzupwitu?” Jackson said, “Yes, he’s a natural genius. But I can beat him.” Years later, Jackson attempted to do that again in response to Prince’s 21 Nights concert series at London’s O2 arena. “I like being the first and the last to do something,” Prince told French newspaper Le Monde of his record breaking concerts. “I asked the producers what had been the record number of shows played consecutively in their venue. They said six. I said that I wanted to do twenty-one.” Prince sold out every night of these 2007 concerts and London’s The Telegraph newspaper hailed the shows with a “Prince Makes History” headline. On his final night at the O2, Prince triumphantly announced, "It doesn’t matter who came before or who comes after. From now on, the O2 is Prince’s house.”
Michael Jackson had other plans for O2. In 2009, he planned his own 50-date run of concerts at the venue. Jackson titled the series of shows This Is It, his curtain call. “He was the one who picked the number 50. He wanted to beat Prince’s record and be in the Guinness Book of World Records,” confirmed Jackson’s manager Frank Dileo to Hits Daily Double.
Prince had a psychological hold on Jackson, and permeated his brainstorming sessions for This Is It. He often called the director Kenny Ortega with grand ideas for the show, such as a colossal representation of Africa’s Victoria Falls on stage. When the production team told Jackson they had enough ambitious vignettes, Jackson’s response revealed he not only saw Prince as his closest competitor, but that he had a spiritual paranoia about him: “If I’m not here to receive these ideas, God might give them to Prince!”
Jackson and Prince’s epic rivalry endured past Jackson’s death. In October 2009, Prince reflected on the King of Pop’s planned 50-show run: “Since then, Michael Jackson showed me that I should go farther.”
Michael Jackson’s longstanding fixation with Prince is just one powerful example of contending with someone else. Years of research, along with countless case studies, proves that rivalry can catalyze higher levels of creativity for musicians and artists, faster speed and performance for athletes, higher grades and better study habits for students and greater levels of innovation for entrepreneurs and engineers.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that a rivalry with a keen competitor can elevate you from good to great, many of us shy away from it. Even though we generally appreciate the power of opposition when it comes to “big” ideas like capitalism and democracy, we often avoid it in our personal lives. We think it petty, counterproductive, self-destructive, and in some cases evil. And whenever we do land in the spotlight, our instinct is to bask in it by ourselves, and to never invite an adversary into the fray as Jackson did many times with Prince.
Michael Jackson evidently understood what Friedrich Nietzsche meant when he wrote “every natural gift must develop itself by contests.” Whether your natural gifts are in business, science, art, education, or sports, the next section will show you how and why a rival can revolutionize your success.
Lesson #1: A rivalry can make you more creative
A Jackson/Prince scale rivalry is not the exception-it’s the rule throughout art and music. In fact, it appears a rival or professional enemy is a necessary ingredient for creative success.
A rich tit for tat drove two of the world’s greatest painters–Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Matisse described his relationship with Picasso as a “boxing match,“ similar to Jackson and Prince’s creative sparring. Indeed, the pairing of their works is a gorgeous blow by blow that Musée Picasso curator Anne Baldassari calls “a beautiful exchange.” Matisse’s explosively colorful 1905 painting Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life) was an offensive move that shook up the Paris salon–and Picasso. Picasso answered with what the Smithsonian hails as Picasso’s “most ambitious and startling painting,” Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Much like Jackson and Prince’s rivalry, the motivation went both ways: Matisse painted "Reclining Nude in the Studio” after witnessing Picasso’s nudes and art experts see Picasso’s The Three Dancers, as a retort to Matisse’s 1912, Nasturtiums with ‘Dance’II. Their rivalry was profoundly instructive, and changed the course of art history, for it was Matisse who showed Picasso an African statue, priming Picasso for his first forays into Cubism. Picasso reflected on his interaction with Matisse in his later years: “You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.”
The Picasso/Matisse battle is reminiscent of the Italian Renaissance idea of rivalry, “paragone.” Paragone entailed placing two artists’ works side by side “in order to judge them” and many art scholars credit this practice with inspiring the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance greats DaVinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. In its “Using Rivalry to Spur” Innovation study, consulting firm McKinsey & Company says that “An integral part of the philosophy of paragone was the belief that such direct comparison could motivate artists to greater feats.” When Pope Leo X commissioned Raphael to design tapestries for the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the knowledge that Michelangelo’s ceiling would crown his work forced Raphael to “push himself to new heights of creative brilliance.” If you’ve ever visited the Sistine Chapel, you can almost feel the energy of the rivalry–two artists at war for greatness.
In the realm of science, where creative solutions to issues reign supreme, the idea of paragone applies as well. Mark Little, the Senior Vice President head of the Global Research Group of General Electric, revealed that many of GE’s triumphs are a result of regularly breaking engineers into separate teams to solve a problem and compete to see which team has the best solution, as they did to create the engine of the Boeing 777, which became one of the best-selling and safest aircrafts in aviation history. GE is not alone in its approach. For famed rivals Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, their differing approach to design became a creative impetus for Jobs to create the touch-screen tablet after Jobs dined with a Microsoft engineer who bragged about a stylus-driven tablet PC he was developing. “I came home and said, ‘Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be,’” Jobs recounted to his biographer Walter Isaacson. The result was the iPad.
Paragone was at play with The Beatles and The Beach Boys. The Beatles’ producer George Martin described the relationship between the Fab Four and the American-based Beach Boys with fighting words–a “transatlantic slugging match, a rivalry conducted by means of songwriting and recording genius.” New Zealand entrepreneurship professor Greg Clydesdale explored the inspiring role of rivalry between the bands in his paper “Creativity and Competition: The Beatles.” When The Beatles’s hits blocked The Beach Boys’ song “Fun, Fun, Fun” from entering the Billboard top four, Beach Boys’ musical mastermind Brian Wilson responded with the most successful music of his career. “I was depressed, really low,” Wilson admitted. “There was just one way to get over that depression. I had to create a new song. I had to look beyond what I had already done, beyond the horizon, and find something new and better than anything I’d done before.” His retort was The Beach Boys’ first ever number one singles, 1964’s “I Get Around” and 1965’s “Help Me Rhonda.” Wilson’s depression was what the 2011 Dutch study “Why Envy Outperforms Admiration” calls “unhappy assertion,” which found that students who experienced discomfort over fellow students’ achievements had increased motivation to study and improved scores on intelligence and creativity tests.
The exchange continued when The Beatles released Rubber Soul in 1965 and Wilson resolved, “They put only great stuff on the album. That’s what I want to do.” The Beach Boys created 1966’s groundbreaking Pet Sounds, which Rolling Stone later ranked as the second greatest album of all time. When The Beatles asked George Martin, “Could we do as well as that?” their producer turned the rivalry into a rallying call and posed the ultimate challenge of rivalry: “We can do better.”
For The Beatles, “better” was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which Rolling Stone ranked as the greatest album of all time. Paul McCartney acknowledged the defining impact of The Beach Boys on Sgt. Pepper’s: “To me, the single biggest influence on Sgt Pepper was The Beach Boys record Pet Sounds and I think Brian Wilson was a great genius…you know he’s got some crazy stuff in there…So we were inspired by you know, and nicked a few ideas.”
The creative effect of direct contest that we’ve seen with Jackson and Prince, Picasso and Matisse and The Beatles and the Beach Boys is no fluke-there’s a strong psychological basis for it. A 2011 study in Ireland tasked two groups of musicians to create an improvised number, a competitive group that was vying for “best improviser” accolades, and a second group that was simply asked to create music. An independent board deemed the competitive group’s compositions “more creative.” The competitive group also identified themselves as more motivated to complete the task. Given that record sales and Billboard charts are intrinsically competitive–there can only be one chart-topping album or single each a week–you can imagine how these dynamics play out for artists competing for real-world distinctions like number one album or single.
This effect debunks one of the biggest misconceptions we have about rivalry, that it’s a zero sum game, where one person’s gain is directly linked to another’s loss. Yet the dynamics are more complex than that. Whether Prince or Jackson, The Beatles or The Beach Boys or Matisse or Picasso was on top, you could never think of any of them as “losers.” A rivalry can enrich both sides of the versus, elevate both parties at the same time, and encourage creative works of genius for the rest of us to enjoy.
Lesson #2: A rival incites you work harder
For Michael Jackson, Prince didn’t just goad him into being more creative; Prince set certain benchmarks for Jackson to hit. Prince was the impetus behind Jackson’s plan to perform 50 comeback concerts at London’s O2 arena, and selling out those shows was a final act that reminded the world of just how popular he still was.
Sometimes, the benchmark is a timetable or a deadline. Other times, the benchmark is a production number. In his classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, Carnegie shares the story of how steel titan Charles M. Schwab utilized intra-company competition to turn around an under-producing steel mill by simply using a leader board, where each shift manager recorded how many heats his shift made that day. Each shift was motivated to outdo the other until the once-lagging mill became the top performer within the entire plant. “The way to get things done,” Schwab concluded “is to stimulate competition.”
This “benchmark” dynamic is common amongst the great sports enemies, such as the epic clash between NBA champions Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Larry Bird which spawned eight national championships between them, three MVP titles each and renewed public fascination with the NBA. Boston Celtic Larry Bird used L.A. Laker Magic Johnson as a specific measure of his prowess. “I’d get up in the mornings and see what [Magic] did because their games came on late, and I’d look at the box score. I had to have him there for some reason, like a crutch, someone I could compare myself to,” Bird said in the HBO documentary Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals. Even when it wasn’t game time, Bird kept Magic in mind as a standard to beat. “(I’d be) wondering if he’s practicing this hard, I bet he shot 500 shots today and I didn’t get 500 in.” Whether you’re talking about 500 shots or in the case of Jackson and Prince, 50 shows, rivals can provide tangible milestones for you to meet. Likewise, your rival could set a sales goal you want to hit, a weight loss target you want to beat, or a G.P.A. you want to reach. The public aspect of a rivalry, the need to show the world, or at least one other person, that you’ve beat a worthy adversary, can be exponentially more inspiring than simply using yourself as a marker.
Success oftentimes is simply about stamina, and an intense competition can not just make you work harder, but longer. For Bird, his rivalry with Johnson physically kept him in the game through painful nerve and disc problems. “I probably should have retired in in ‘88 ‘89, but it’s that competition-maybe one more chance me and Magic will get together in the Finals,” Bird said. Bird had back surgery in the summer of 1991 to buy himself some time, but when Johnson retired in November 1991 after announcing he had contracted HIV, Bird said, “It changed my love for basketball.” The feeling never came back. “I didn’t check the papers any more [for box scores] It didn’t matter. I still wanted to compete but it wasn’t the same.” Bird played out that season, and retired.
There is a physical basis for this boost in performance. A 2003 British study found that soccer players who were facing extreme rivals had higher levels of testosterone before game time than when they were facing teams they didn’t consider rivals. NYU professor Gavin J. Kilduff studied six years of running club results and found that 5K runners who competed with rivals shaved between 20 and 30 seconds from their run time than when they were running alone. Think about that the next time you train for a half-marathon. In his study of NCAA teams, Kilduff also found that rivalry increases “success on effort-based tasks” such as blocked shots. In other words, rivalry inspires more sweat.
Intense competition can inspire another physical challenge–weight loss. The successes we see in the weight loss competition show The Biggest Loser occur off-camera as well, most notably in a Rhode Island initiative the decreased the percentage of obese participants from 39 percent to 31 percent through team competition. According to a study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, people who included friends or family members to help them shed weight lost more pounds, and kept them off longer than people who didn’t use the buddy system. As one study subject remarked of her buddy: “We’re happy for each other’s successes, and there’s also a small element of competition that is beneficial to both of us. It’s a win-win situation as we lose-lose.”
Lesson #3: Intense competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive
The beauty of competition is that you can compete and cooperate with someone at the same time. This nexus of competition and cooperation is called “coopetition,” used to describe everything from Apple’s relationship with Microsoft to the United States’ stance with China.
Even though Jackson’s attempts at coopetition with Prince on “We Are the World” and “Bad” never materialized, history is stacked with successful examples of coopetition. In music, many fans know of the famed coopetition between Paul McCartney and John Lennon, which Beatles’ producer George Martin credited for much of the group’s success. McCartney explained of Lennon, “He’d write ‘Strawberry Fields.’ I’d go away and write ‘Penny Lane.’ If I’d write ‘I’m Down,’ he’d go away and write something similar to that…It was very friendly competition because we were both going to share in the rewards anyway…”
Another stellar example of coopetition in action is the legendary film critics Siskel and Ebert, who many don’t know were arch rivals. Josh Schollmeyer’s book, Enemies: A Love Story, paints the picture of dueling movie critics–Roger Ebert for Chicago Sun-Times and Gene Siskel at the Chicago Tribune. Siskel said they “disliked each other intensely,” so much so that Ebert “bullied” the younger Siskel one night when they happened upon the same watering hole. Nevertheless, TV executive Thea Flaum approached the enemies to host a show together. Ebert, who had just won a Pulitzer, was initially skeptical and asked Flaum, “Why should I do the show?” Flaum’s response hits the heart of why rivalry is so powerful: “Because I can make you better.”
Siskel and Ebert’s creative contention meant their two thumbs up movie reviews were a rare and valued rating–and became a pop culture standard that endures today outside of films. The collaborative rivalry made the men more committed to their job as well. “I think both of us were eager to do the job because we couldn’t conceive of letting the other guy do it without us,” Ebert once said.
In the mid 1980s, Siskel looked back on their bond and said “We’ve turned a negative relationship into a positive relationship by confronting each other. Psychologists, of course, would have a field day with this result. But I understand what Nietzsche meant when he said, ‘In a friend you should have your best enemy.’ It’s a worthwhile thought that your enemy can teach you more about yourself. There’s something in the enemy relationship that’s very potent, and that’s what we’ve tried to seize upon.”
Michael Jackson and Prince were “frenemies” as well. Over the years, Jackson mailed Prince performance videos of Sly and the Family Stone–a group they both enjoyed–and Prince invited Jackson to his Paisley Park complex outside of Minneapolis where they played basketball and ping pong (Later Prince snarkily said that Jackson played like “Helen Keller”) proving that rivals can indeed collaborate socially, if not professionally.
Lesson #4: Avoid Competitive Arousal
Competition, similar to nearly everything else, is best in moderation. If you’ve ever been embroiled in the final throes of an eBay auction in which you and another bidder are gunning for the same item, you have probably experienced what is known as “competitive arousal.” Suddenly, you find yourself inching up your bids. You lose sight of the actual value of the item. As the countdown heads to zero, your goal switches from purchasing the item at a reasonable price to beating your opponent. Within moments, your bids outstrip the item’s real worth, not to mention your budget. Once you “win,” the countdown to bidder’s remorse begins.
As much as rivalry can help you achieve–it can also unravel your position and result in tremendous losses if you succumb to its pitfalls. A Harvard Business Review study by management experts Malhotra Deepak, Ku Gillian and Murnighan J. Keith explored competitive arousal, where the desire to win blinds people into making bad decisions, such as over bidding. The scholars found that auction participants who were competing against a single rival bidder were more likely to overpay for the contested item than participants who were facing a group of bidders.
On a bigger level, we can at least in part blame rivalry gone wrong for News Corp’s ill-fated purchase of Myspace. Famed enemies News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Viacom founder Sumner Redstone were locked in a heated bidding war for the social networking company during a weekend in 2005. According to a 2006 Vanity Fair story, when Murdoch’s bid went past the half a billion dollar mark, Redstone called his rival’s move “irrational” and criticized him for his willingness to “pay anything.” News Corp was left holding the very expensive bag: less than six years later, News Corp sold Myspace for a humiliating $35 million.
Sometimes, the competitive arousal phenomenon is more grave than financial. If you believe accounts that Michael Jackson took the anaesthetic propofol because he was stressed and sleepless over his upcoming ambitious schedule of 50 This Is It concerts, you may wonder if Jackson ultimately “overbid” Prince’s 21-show run at the O2 arena to his own detriment. Jackson used propofol as a sleep aid, and his rivalry with Prince literally kept him up at night, telling This Is It director Kenny Ortega, “God channels this through me at night. I can’t sleep because I’m so super-charged.” If this competitive arousal indeed led Jackson to perform past his physical limitations, it may have cost him his life.
When you’re personally entangled with a rival, it’s easy to inflate the value of something you both desire. People often overbid–either with their money or their time–because they overestimate the cost of losing out to a rival. To counter that, recruit trusted colleagues and advisors to help you estimate the opportunity cost of losing out to your rival. That number, plus the absolute worth of the contested item to you, should equal the maximum amount of what you’re willing to pay. Anything greater than that is irrational and costly competitive arousal.
Lesson #4: Your rival is a goal
A rival is a living breathing goal. Beyond the creative exchange, benchmarks of success and sweat equity that competition inspires, a rival is a goal that you can see, touch, hear, talk to and learn from.
Even the most well-defined goal can still be amorphous. It exists in your mind, and becomes the stuff of daydreams. A rival, however, can personify your dreams. Just as Michael Jackson embodied a career trajectory for Prince, it’s the visceral nature of a rival that impels you to work faster, harder, more thoughtfully and creatively with tangible results. And if you harness the power of rivalry enough, it can even compel you to become iconic. This is the reason that sibling rivals are often the strongest personification of your goals. Deborah Tannen, Georgetown University professor and author of You Were Always Mom’s Favorite, says of sibling rivalry “It is a combination of competition and inspiration. Maybe you have to see someone like you achieving to feel that you could do it.”
The nine brothers and sisters of the Jackson family felt the logarithmic effect of sibling rivalry. Each member of the Jackson family enjoyed some level of Billboard success, including eldest sibling Rebbie and middle sister La Toya. Yet it was Janet and Michael who shared the friendliest rivalry and engaged in close “coopetition.” Jackson said of all of his siblings, Janet was “like his twin.” She helped him demo some of his biggest songs such as “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” but she also saw him as a rival. When Oprah Winfrey asked Janet in 1997 “Do you feel competitive with [Michael]?” Janet replied, “I’m competitive with everyone.” When Oprah pressed her, “including him…competitive in you want to sell more albums, as many albums?” Janet set the record straight replying, “yes.” The rivalry was evidently fruitful. Of all the Jacksons, Janet came closest to Michael’s commercial success, with over 140 million records sold.
We also see the sibling effect in highly successful sisters like tennis legends Venus Williams and Serena Williams. Serena credits her rivalry with her older sister into making her one of the greatest female athletes of all time and told Oprah magazine, “When we were younger, it was difficult for me to play Venus because she’d always beat me so badly. I had to improve just so I could stay in the game.”
Forbes.com noted the curious success of sisters in corporate America and Congress. Out of less than 100 female Congresswomen, 2 are sisters, Loretta and Linda Sanchez of California, and out of roughly a dozen female Fortune 1000 CEOs, Maggie Wilderotter of Frontier Communications and Denise Morrison of Campbell Soup Company are siblings. Outside of some evidently strong rearing, when you consider the goal-attaining impact of a sibling, these familial success stories make sense.
The Williams, Sanchez and CEO sisters raise another misconception about rivalry: that it’s a man’s game. Morrison and Wilderotter’s mother taught them from an early age that ambition is a natural part of femininity. When we recast competition and productive conflict as something inherent and productive for everybody–we will see even more people enjoying the benefits of a good, old-fashioned rivalry.
Look around. You can imagine that you’re competing with everyone–all of your colleagues, classmates, fellow artists or entrepreneurs. Yet who would mean the most to you to outrun, outsell, outperform? What victory would be sweetest and give you the greatest personal and psychological gain? Who do you want to relegate to number two so badly you can you physically feel it? This person is greater than a regular competitor–this person is your chosen enemy, your ultimate rival.
There are some practical ways to distinguish your rival from a sea of potential competitors. Although Michael Jackson technically competed with every artist who threatened Thriller’s supremacy on the Billboard charts, from the Australian band Men at Work to the British band The Police, it was Prince who had all the makings of a rival. In his study of rivalry in the NCAA, New York University professor and competition expert Gavin J. Kilduff found that rivals have certain properties that differentiate them from regular competitors. Rivals typically have similar characteristics, physical proximity, a history of prior interaction, command a “psychological involvement” and raise the stakes of winning. Prince and Jackson had all of these attributes in abundance.
Similar Characteristics & Skills
The first thing that separated Prince from Jackson’s other competitors was that they had similar profiles. They were both male solo artists who sang, wrote music and danced, talents Jackson didn’t share with Sting, the frontman of The Police.
Seek a rival with a similar talent level. If your rival is less talented than you, they will fail to motivate; you will always win and your “opponent” won’t provide an challenging benchmark for you. Trying to compete with someone who is markedly different from you can be exhausting, and possibly counterproductive. Kilduff’s NCAA study found that teams with similar records had stronger rivalries. Similarities make you pay close attention to a rival–almost like looking at a reflection of yourself. Magic Johnson said that he and Larry Bird were “mirrors of each other,” and indeed, only a well-matched can truly inspire you.
To boost your competitive strategy, consider selecting an opponent who you think is slightly ahead of you in talent, position and accolades. A higher status competitor, Kilduff concluded, can increase your feelings of rivalry, perhaps due to the desire to gain status through comparison. There’s an added benefit: when you beat someone who is one step ahead of you, you have by definition progressed.
Similar Backgrounds, Physical Proximity & Prior Interaction
Prince and Michael Jackson were both African-American men born in the Midwest in 1958, a profile Jackson didn’t share with Men at Work or The Police. Background and proximity matter–the closer the opponents, the stronger the rivalry. Kilduff’s NCAA study found that teams in the same state like Arizona and Arizona State or Washington and Washington State were more likely to be intense rivals than teams in different states.
The artists had some other curious similarities. Michael Jackson’s maternal grandfather was named Prince Screws, part of a long line of Screws men also named Prince. Jackson, of course, went on to name his eldest Prince. Michael Jackson was also a Jehovah’s Witness who went door-to-door to spread the gospel, which Prince also did when he converted to the religion in 2001.
Having similar backgrounds and talent increases your clash quotient–your opportunity for defining and motivating showdowns. After all, your paths have to cross at some point for it to be a real rivalry. With Jackson and Prince both being R&B pop artists and James Brown disciples with a similar age and background meant that they’d have plenty of chances to clash, be it on stage with the Godfather of Soul or on the album charts.
Even though we may want to pick a rival we’ll rarely encounter–that’s not the ideal strategy. Consistent opposition is more powerful than the occasional matchup. Someone who works in your office will probably ignite more competitive feelings in you than someone who works in a satellite office across the country. For a myriad of reasons, you’ll be more inspired to beat the shop owner across the street than one in the next town. Even as technology makes physical distance less relevant, there’s no substitute for the electrifying energy that being close to your competitor can elicit. When picking your rival, consider someone you’ve crossed paths with before, whether it was working together on a previous project or competed with for rank at work, and whom you’ll likely encounter again. It could be the person who you edged you out of a job, or barely beat you on an exam.
Psychological Involvement
Perhaps the most important element of a great rivalry is the psychological and emotional hold it has. Kilduff explains that a rival can elicit “increased psychological involvement” and instill a motivation to perform that extends beyond a regular competitive spirit. For Jackson to think of Prince when he was on stage with James Brown, writing the title track to his follow-up to Thriller and when he was creatively brainstorming for his This Is It concerts–literally keeping him up at night–conveys more than the power of shared profiles, talents and backgrounds. This rivalry had a psychological hold on Jackson that raised the stakes of competing with Prince versus anyone else.
It’s this personal engagement that distinguishes a rival from all other opponents. You place a greater significance on the outcome of a face-off with a rival versus another adversary. For Larry Bird, it wasn’t Julius “Dr. J” Irving, Moses Malone or Michael Jordan–all of whom were also named MVP in the 1980s. One man drove him more than any other.
As a final thought in selecting a rival, keep in mind that you don’t need “agreement” from your opponent–they don’t need to officially recognize you as a rival. Unlike love, a great and productive rivalry can be unrequited.
Bringing It All Together: You Can’t Do It Alone
Our great achievements are often solitary affairs. It is you who stays up late to write that screenplay, compose that song, study for an exam or start that business. We can feel isolated in our quest–particularly when we’re striving for something new.
Whenever we do peer out from our industrious cocoon, we restrict our embrace to the people who can directly help us, the friends and family who selflessly want us to reach our goals. All the while, we will ignore the fact that your biggest asset and your best friend, is probably your competitive enemy.
If you are just starting out in your world domination, a rivalry can inspire you to get to great fast. If you’re already a leader in your game, like Jackson was when Prince entered the music scene, a rival can unnerve you out of complacency and force you to stay hungry.
It’s a force so fundamental and elementary, even a child can see it. In December 2013, 9-year old Florida swimmer Josh Zuchowski noticed that his 10-year old rival Reese Branzell missed back-to-back meets because he was sick at home from a bacterial infection. After Josh swept the second meet without Reese, he didn’t celebrate his rival’s absence. Instead, he took home his trophies and wrote Reese this note: “Get well soon. So we can get back to battling in the pool…You were an inspiration for me wanting to swim fast. I would rather get second with you at the meet than win with you absent.” The boy enclosed one of his newly-won five high-point trophies as an offering. The gesture was more than kind, it was insightful. A child’s simple acknowledgement of something that the masters all know: rivals are necessary, and we owe so many of our highest rewards to them. A victory against a driving competitor is richer and indicative of your talent than a blowout without them in the running.
The power of rivalry is something that none of us can afford to ignore, at any age. Picasso and Matisse, The Beatles and the Beach Boys, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and Prince and the King of Pop and many more are all proof that racing against someone else can be the best way to reach the throne.
Dara Cook is a writer, television executive producer and former music journalist. For seven glorious years she was the Head Writer of the MTV Video Music Awards. She can be reached on [email protected].
