Thriving rival

Rivalry is our pop culture candy, the juice of the daily squeeze for power, prominence and perfection we watch with bated breath. We surround ourselves with these collisions of competition, these personality-driven little wars, be they in the Senate or the cinema, in the marketplace or across a mud-soaked field.

Call it the vestiges of our tribal ancestors still wrestling in our chests, grasping for that fight or flight rush of combat and life-or-death survival that much of modernity has bled out of our existence. Just call it omnipresent.

Whether publicly or privately, we ride these big-time battle lines, and we goad the opponents on—and on and on.

Just look at what we’re watching right now.

On the small screen, a disgraced Don Draper is playing the part of a comeback kid battling against all of his ad agency partners on AMC’s Mad Men.

At the movies, suburb-dwellers are in a hilariously not-so-cold war in Neighbors, and in the surreally powerful The Double, a neurotic government agency drone is competing against his own doppelganger for the promotion and the girl.

If you like your rivalries on a massive scale, you have a few options: aliens (Edge of Tomorrow) or giant robots who are also aliens (Transformers: Age of Extinction).

In music, modern rock’s biggest sibling rivalry is back in the limelight this month with the release of a new Oasis documentary and a deluxe re-issue of the bickering Gallagher brothers’ first three albums.

A closer look at these cultural clashes almost always supports the somewhat counterintuitive notion that rivalries do not distract us or drain us of energy. In fact, very intense competition can result in the exact opposite. The cover subjects in this very issue back up this notion.

Rivalries give us purpose. They focus us, like a photographer turning her lens until the image in her view is razor sharp.

We see the converse effects of this principle often play out in Tiger Stadium when LSU is facing a “cupcake game” opponent, and our very unfocused players look like they just rolled out of bed during the first half of the game.

Few change agents of the 20th century benefited from this type of intense concentration on a competitor more than boundary-breaking artists Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. For decades these renowned painters pushed each other to the limits. They criticized each other, borrowed from each other and religiously studied one another’s work. But above all, each elevated his opponent to new artistic heights.

“Only one person has the right to criticize me,” Matisse said. “It’s Picasso.”

Their lifelong creative showdown should prove to any artist, entrepreneur or professional today that a respectful rivalry isn’t to be feared or laughed off, but run toward, full speed ahead.

Competition doesn’t always end with a victor and a failure. Life is not sports. It’s not a zero-sum equation. Apple and IBM are each better off for the other’s existence.

No, it’s not whether you win or lose. It’s how you play the game.

And the best thing about rivals is that we get to choose our own, based on our unique goals and our expectations for ourselves. Just know there’s always one rival you can’t shake no matter what: yourself.

“I fight against myself, not against the other,” Luciano Pavarotti said.”I try to be better than is possible.”