What Taylor Swift Learned From VH1's Behind The Music

Taylor Swift recently sat down for an interview with GQ magazine, where she talked about what she learned from watching VH1's Behind the Music. The magazine quotes her as follows:

"I used to watch ‘Behind the Music’ every day. When other kids were watching normal shows, I’d watch ‘Behind the Music.’ And I would see these bands that were doing so well, and I’d wonder what went wrong. I thought about this a lot. And what I established in my brain was that a lack of self-awareness was always the downfall. That was always the catalyst for the loss of relevance and the loss of ambition and the loss of great art,. So self-awareness has been such a huge part of what I try to achieve on a daily basis. It’s less about reputation management and strategy and vanity than it is about trying to desperately preserve self-awareness, since that seems to be the first thing to go out the door when people find success.”

"Am I shooting from the hip? Would any of this have happened if I was? In that sense, I do think about things before they happen. But here was someone taking a positive thing — the fact that I think about things and that I care about my work — and trying to make that into an insinuation about my personal life. Highly offensive. You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.”