The Michael Jackson Problem — and Why It's Yours Too

I was thirteen years old, sitting in my brother's flat, looking after his cat for the day. Hardly the setting for a life-altering moment. But somewhere between the first and second listen of a record I'd picked up on a whim, something cracked open in me — an overwhelming curiosity, a hunger I didn't have words for yet.

The album was Thriller.

I remember sitting there with the cover in my hands. Staring at this man. Trying to figure out what had just happened to me. Who was this person who had so completely discombobulated me in ways I was too young to process? He was a mystery — untouchable, and yet somehow living inside every single one of us. So near and yet so far.

That hunger didn't go away. It grew.

I remember staying up until midnight at a friend's house to watch the release of the Thriller video — all fourteen minutes of it.

Four years after Thriller first found me, I'm standing on the ground at Olympic Park in Melbourne. Tens of thousands of people around me. And I couldn't tell you a single thing about any of them. Because the moment Michael Jackson walked onto that stage, I was the only person there. He moved across the crowd on a crane at one point — this impossible, otherworldly figure — close enough that I felt like I could reach out and touch him. He was performing for everyone and for no one but me, simultaneously.

That is not a normal thing for a human being to do to another human being.

I learned the dance moves to The Way You Make Me Feel and actually performed them at nightclubs, because that's what we did back then. We didn't just listen to Michael Jackson. We inhabited him. We brought him into our bodies and our Friday nights and our sense of what was possible.

In my early twenties, I got ready to go out listening to HIStory. In my thirties, when my daughter started performing herself, I went back through his early catalogue — the Jackson 5 years, the child performer years — because she was young, and he had been too. And what stopped me in my tracks was the same thing that had stopped me at thirteen: he knew how to connect to lyrics beyond his years. He felt things at an age when most children are still learning to name their feelings. And I saw that in my daughter. And it broke me open all over again.

That is not a fan relationship. That is a life scored by someone else's genius.

I've been thinking about that a lot this week, after watching the new Michael Jackson biopic. And I want to talk about it not because the film frustrated me in ways I'll get to — but because there is something in his story that is directly, urgently relevant to every person in this community who is building a business in their zone of genius.

First, the Numbers

Because before we talk about anything else, let's just sit with this for a moment.

As of this week, Michael Jackson has 111 million monthly listeners on Spotify. He is the fourth most-listened-to artist on the platform — in the entire world — right now, in 2026, seventeen years after he died. He is ahead of artists who are currently touring. Currently releasing music. Currently spending millions on promotion and algorithms and TikTok campaigns.

He has 46 million followers on Spotify alone.

He is the only artist in history to have Top 10 hits across six decades. He sold an estimated one billion records. His eight Grammy wins in a single night in 1984 remain the most ever earned by any artist in one evening. Bad was the first album to generate five consecutive number one singles. "You Are Not Alone" was the first song in history to debut at number one.

Thriller remains the best-selling album of all time. Not of its era. Of all time.

This is not legacy. This is not nostalgia. This is an active, living, compounding force that seventeen years of absence has done nothing to diminish. If anything, it's growing.

There is a reason for that. And it is the thing I most want to talk about.

The Movie Got the Shape Right and Missed the Soul

Let me be honest about the film, because I think the frustration I felt watching it is instructive.

It wasn't a bad film. The performances were solid. But it was a film that kept giving you two-second snapshots of moments that deserved ten minutes. The beatings from his father were there — but the devastation wasn't, not the depth of it. Seconds of Michael in the bathroom crying justing didn't reach into that trauma. The terror of growing up under Joseph Jackson, the way that kind of childhood shapes and breaks a person simultaneously, the psychological cost of surviving that and then channelling it into art — all of it was rushed past like a signpost on a freeway.

Thriller — the greatest musical achievement of our lifetime — was reduced to some Post-it notes on a board. We saw his process briefly, but not enough to appreciate his brilliance. We didn't see him learning the moonwalk — just that he did it. We didn't see Brooke Shields, Tatum O'Neal, the texture of his personal life, the giddiness of money for the first time, the joy and the sadness of who he was behind closed doors. The film was trying to fit everything in, and in doing so, it gave us the outline of the man without the interior.

For an audience who was alive during that era — who lived the mania, who stayed up at midnight for the Thriller video, who took his dance moves to nightclubs — the outline is enough to trigger the memory of the depth. We fill it in ourselves.

But for a younger audience who didn't live it? The film needed to go deeper. Not broader. Deeper. Because Michael Jackson was not a surface phenomenon. He was a depth event. And you cannot communicate a depth event by skating across it.

What the film inadvertently revealed is the same thing that happens to extraordinary people all the time: the world reaches for the easiest version of them. The most legible version. The one that fits in a sentence.

Michael Jackson — King of Pop. Thriller. Moonwalk. Eccentric. Done.

Except he wasn't done. He was barely started.

What He Actually Was

Here is what I believe Michael Jackson was, stripped of everything else: a human being living in full, complete, uncompromising alignment with his zone of genius.

Not part of the time. Not when it was convenient. Not when the label agreed, or the market was ready, or the critics were on board. Always. Completely. At the cost of almost everything else a normal life contains.

The IT factor — people talk about it like it's some genetic accident, some lucky roll of the dice. And yes, there was something innate in him that cannot be taught. But what separated Michael Jackson from every other talented person who has ever walked this earth was not just what he had. It was what he did with it. The totality with which he pursued it. You couldn't isolate any one thing — it was how he did everything. The voice, the movement, the production, the visuals, the theatrics, the storytelling, the business of it. He was a master in every dimension simultaneously, and he didn't outsource any of it to someone else's vision.

And crucially — he commercialised it. Brilliantly. He wanted Thriller to be the greatest album of all time, but not just for the award or the label or the critical consensus. The commercial success and the artistic vision were, for him, the same thing. He understood that the art had to reach people — had to penetrate the culture at its deepest levels — or it hadn't done its job. He wasn't making music for a small appreciative audience. He was making music for the entire world. And he knew exactly how to make that happen.

He followed his own heart completely — and he knew how to make that heart beat in 111 million people every single month.

That is not an accident. That is not just talent. That is someone who understood their purpose at a molecular level and refused, at every turn, to betray it.

The Thing Nobody Says Loudly Enough

But here is what the film touched and didn't hold: the loneliness.

Fame at that level — genius at that level — creates a kind of isolation that most people cannot imagine. Not just the physical isolation of being mobbed wherever you go, of never walking down a street unrecognised. The interior isolation. The experience of being so far beyond what the people around you can comprehend that real connection — the kind where someone simply sees you — becomes almost impossible.

Who do you talk to when you are Michael Jackson? Who understands what it is to carry what you carry? Who can sit with you in the reality of your experience without projecting onto it, or wanting something from it, or being so awed by the phenomenon that they stop seeing the person?

The money doesn't fix it. The fame certainly doesn't fix it. The Neverland Ranch, the animals, the children— these are not evidence of madness or evil. They are the artefacts of a person trying to build a world that felt safe and comprehensible when the actual world had stopped making sense. They are the evidence of a person in profound need of peace and belonging who could not find it in the places the rest of us find it. Evidence of a man who was searching for what money could not buy him.

Michael Jackson, at the absolute peak of human achievement in his field, was probably one of the loneliest people alive.

I think about that. I think about the fact that this man whose music lived inside me at thirteen, at seventeen, at twenty-two, at thirty-something watching my own daughter perform — this man who made millions of people feel completely, utterly seen — may never have felt that himself. Not really.

And I want us to sit with that. Not to pity him. But to understand it. Because that kind of loneliness is not exclusive to the extraordinarily famous.

Why This Matters to You

If you are building a business in your zone of genius — if you are the person in your world who sees things others don't see, who operates at a level your market is still catching up to, who has carved out something genuinely singular — then you know something about this.

Not at his scale. But the dynamic is real.

The more fully you inhabit your genius, the harder it becomes to find people who simply get it. The more you push toward the work that is truly yours, the more you risk being misunderstood by the people around you who love you but can't quite see what you're building or why. The more successful you become, the more people want something from you — and the harder it gets to find the ones who just want you.

That loneliness — the quiet, particular loneliness of operating at the edge of what's familiar — is not a sign that something has gone wrong.

It is the topography of this kind of work.

The question is what you do with it.

Most people shrink. Most people hit that loneliness and hear it as a signal to pull back. To make their thing smaller, more legible, easier to explain. To stop before the work gets truly great because the isolation of the pursuit has become too much to bear.

Michael Jackson did not do that.

He faced that fear. He walked into it, over and over again, throughout his entire life. He was beaten as a child by a father who was supposed to protect him. He was exploited as an adolescent. He was misunderstood as an adult. He was vilified publicly in ways that are almost impossible to comprehend. And he kept going. He kept creating. He kept pushing toward the work.

Because the purpose was greater than any fear he felt.

That's the sentence. Right there. That is the whole thing.

His purpose was load-bearing. It held everything else up — the fear, the grief, the isolation, the being systematically dismantled before he was even fully formed. None of it stopped him, because the why was bigger than all of it.

What He Understood That Most Business Owners Don't

Michael Jackson understood something about his zone of genius that most people in business never fully grasp: depth and reach are not opposites.

The myth — and I hear it constantly from business owners in this community — is that the more deeply you go into your thing, the more you niche down, the more you follow your actual instincts rather than what the market says it wants, the smaller your audience becomes. That going fully into yourself is the enemy of scale.

Michael Jackson's entire career is a refutation of that idea.

He went deeper than anyone. He refused to make things simpler or more palatable or easier to consume. He demanded more from his art, more from his collaborators, more from his audience. And in doing so, he didn't shrink his reach — he expanded it beyond anything anyone had seen before or has seen since.

Because when something is genuinely, completely, uncompromisingly itself — when there is no gap between the creator and the creation — people feel it. Even if they can't articulate what they're feeling. Even if they're thirteen years old sitting in their brother's flat, holding an album cover, overcome by a hunger they don't yet have words for.

They feel it because it's real. Because it's whole. Because it came from somewhere true.

111 million people a month still feel it.

Seventeen years after he left.

That is what your people are looking for from you. Not the polished, palatable, easier-to-digest version. The true one. The version that is completely, uncomplicatedly yours. The one that costs you something to make. The one that comes from the same place his did.

The Invitation

The biopic frustrated me because it gave us the catalogue without the man. It showed us what he did without spending enough time on why, and how, and what it cost him, and what he understood about human beings that made it possible.

But maybe that's also its gift — because it sent me back to the music. Back to that teenager in her brother's flat, overcome by something she couldn't name. Back to midnight and a fourteen-minute video and a group of friends who already knew, somehow, that they were watching something that would matter forever. Back to Olympic Park and a crane and the impossible feeling of being the only person in a crowd of tens of thousands.

Back to my daughter, young and performing, and the moment I understood what I'd been watching in him all those years — a person who felt everything fully and then had the audacity to put it somewhere the rest of us could find it.

The greatest thing any of us can do — in our businesses, in our work, in our lives — is find the thing that reaches through the speakers and grabs someone by something essential in them. The thing that makes them feel, even for a moment, like you made it just for them.

Michael Jackson found that thing. He found it early and he held onto it for his entire life at enormous personal cost. He didn't always get the support he needed. He didn't always get the understanding. He was lonely in ways that money could not touch and fame made worse.

But he never let go of the work.

That's the play.

Find your thing. Hold onto it. Go deeper, not smaller. Let the purpose be bigger than the fear.

And trust that somewhere out there, right now, there is a person sitting with your work in their hands — hungry for something they don't yet have words for.

Make it worth their while.

Sam Morris is co-founder of The O8, a business coaching and cash systems company for B2B service business owners who are done playing small. Find out more at theo8.com.