I tend to be pretty good about preparing for the near future — doublechecking itineraries, preparing notes for client calls, things like that. In the grand scheme of things, those are pretty easy to do.
On the other side of things, you have the prep that Taylor Swift had to put into her shows and it blew my mind. I had been curious how she was able to do three-and-a-half-hour shows back-to-back-to-back every weekend for months on end, with no complaints of “she didn’t really have it together tonight.”
The answer is simple: she prepared like a beast.
From an interview she recently had with Time:
Her training regimen included running on the treadmill every day while singing the entire Eras setlist aloud—”Fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs”—following a specialized strength, conditioning, and weights program at her gym, Dogpound, and doing three months of dance lessons.
That description can be a bit misleading if you don’t dig into it. The first part (“running on the treadmill”) is more than 99% of humans could handle. She’d be on the treadmill for more than three hours every day, speeding up and slowing down, and singing every song as she went.
That alone would put her in rare air, but she also did other strength, conditioning and weight work. It’s stunning.
It goes back to something I shared last month, with Bobby Knight’s quote of “It is the will to prepare to win that is important.“
Many people wish to have the success that Taylor has had, and to able to sing to stadiums full of people. In fact, most of those people would give it everything they have if they were in that situation. She’s done that as well, as the shows were stunningly good, but it’s her will to prepare that made all the difference.
Those that can put in a ridiculous amount of work behind the scenes often end up as the ones that make it look easy when we see them perform.
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