Over three decades ago David Bowie was invited onto Count Down –– Europe’s most popular rock show at the time –– to do an interview.

The interview lasted a little over twelve minutes and Bowie oozed a coolness and a sophistication for every second of it; a coolness and sophistication that wasn’t always tremendously apparent in his live performances where one would not be wrong in reaching for adjectives like “eccentric” and “extraterrestrial” to describe his various characters.

At the three-minute and thirty-six-second mark, the interviewer asks Bowie a question…

“Do you have competitors?”

To which David Bowie responds with a calm rant that every creative and competitive person needs to hear…

*David Bowie is speaking now*

“I would say that I stay out of it. I’d like to say that. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, you can tell me from the outside.

But I don’t really feel that. I feel that, frankly, over the last twenty years or so, I’m pretty much my own man.

I suppose it’s pretty cheeky of me to put myself in the same light. But, if I look at Bob Dylan, he doesn’t have competition. He’s just Bob Dylan. Whether you like him or you don’t like him, whether he does good stuff or bad stuff, he’s still Bob Dylan. And, you don’t compare him with anybody.

It’s not a competitive kind of thing.

And, I would hope that I’m… I think I probably am… in the same kind of position… I’m David Bowie.”

“I’m David Bowie.”

As a writer and ad man who is wildly competitive, this interview was like a cold glass of water after a long, perilous trout through the desert.

It made me realize that I’ve been looking at this all wrong. I don’t have competition. I’m Cole Schafer.

But, I digress.

By Cole Schafer.