There is something Stylist has been turning over lately, and it involves the Bella Mackie mid-career rival argument: the idea that identifying a genuine competitor, someone whose progress genuinely needles you, might be exactly the engine a stalling career requires. It is not a comfortable proposition. It is, however, a persuasive one.
Mackie, a former journalist who worked for The Guardian and Vice before pivoting to books, has built something of a reputation for reframing the things we are supposed to feel quietly ashamed of. Her argument here follows that pattern: instead of treating the competitive urge as something to suppress, she proposes treating it as information. A rival, in her reading, is not a source of bitterness but a useful mirror. You find someone who is doing the version of the thing you want to be doing, and you let that fact work on you.
The writer behind the argument
It helps to know where Mackie is coming from. Her first book, Jog On, was a memoir about mental health and running, a subject she approached with the same dry practicality she brings to most things. It found its audience, and it established her as a writer who could make self-improvement feel like something other than a motivational poster.
What followed was rather more dramatic. Her debut novel, How to Kill Your Family, became a number-one Sunday Times bestseller and spent 47 weeks in the paperback top 10, according to HarperCollins. For a first novel, those are numbers that tend to end conversations. They also, one suspects, give her a certain authority when it comes to talking about ambition, momentum, and what it takes to push through the middle of a career when the early excitement has dissolved into something more like grinding routine.
The Bella Mackie mid-career rival case, examined
The mid-career slump is a real and under-discussed phenomenon. It tends to arrive somewhere between the initial energy of starting out and the settled confidence of having properly arrived. The work is competent, perhaps even good, but the forward motion has dulled. You are no longer the interesting newcomer, and you are not yet the established figure. It is an uncomfortable plateau.
Mackie’s contention is that the right rival can disturb that plateau productively. The key word is right. She is not advocating for the corrosive kind of envy that makes you spend forty-five minutes examining someone else’s career with a mixture of resentment and despair. She is describing something more targeted: a figure whose specific trajectory makes your own ambitions feel concrete and achievable rather than vague and remote.
There is a reasonable psychology behind this. Abstract goals are harder to pursue than embodied ones. If the thing you want is to write a column, or make partner, or shift from execution to strategy, watching someone a few steps ahead of you do exactly that transforms the aspiration from theory into evidence. It has been done. It can, by extension, be done by you.
The distinction she draws, between useful rivalry and destructive comparison, is where the argument earns its keep. Most of us are fluent in the second. We are less practised at the first, which requires a degree of honesty about what you actually want, as opposed to what you feel you ought to want. Identifying the right rival demands that you identify the right goal, which is harder than it sounds.
Mackie’s career itself offers an oblique illustration of the principle. Moving from journalism to memoir to bestselling fiction is not a straight line. Each shift required her to be very clear about where she was pointing herself, and presumably to notice who was already there.
How to Kill Your Family spent 47 weeks in the paperback top 10, a fact that rather answers the question of whether the strategy works. Whether the rival was real or imagined, the momentum was not.
