In case you missed it, Taylor Swift recently became the youngest women to ever be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and her speech was bursting with words of wisdom and gratitude.
Here’s what she said about mastering her craft, dealing with negativity and appreciating the sacrifices her family made so she could be where she is today.
1. Learn along the way
“When I say that songwriting was the easiest part for me, I think what I mean is that it was instinctual. No one taught me how to do it .
I had to be taught how to entertain a crowd and learn choreography and be less annoying and navigate the industry and fiercely protect my sanity. I had to learn all of that over time through difficult lessons and massive amounts of trial and error and chaos and calamity.”
2. Negative feedback is survivable
“Positive feedback… feels incredible, and I hope you get lots of it, but you need to be ready to receive negative feedback, whether you seet it out or not…
What I hope you discover is this: You can be sensitive, but also durable, and you can accept that feedback and skepticism and criticism are inevitable. You can take what’s useful or constructive from that information and leave out what’s simply damaging to your creativity.”
3. Know what you love
“If I had advice for youn artists… I would say you really have to prioritise what you love down to your very core. Because you’ll need that if your song ever gets heard by the public, or the critics, or the haters posing as critics, or the people chronically online, or the robots posing as people who are chronically online.”
4. You art won’t be for everyone (and that’s okay!)
“No one does or should make art that appeals to everyone everywhere all the time…OUr goal is to elicit that glint of recognition in another human being, because something that felt good and true to us feels good and true to them at the same time.”
5. Recognise the team effort
“It was easy to choose songwriting over everything else in my life. But it couldn’t have been easy for my parents and my brother to just pick up and move our entire family so that I could hone my craft…
And even though words are supposed to be my thing, I will never be able to express my gratitude to you guys for doing that for me.”
Taylor now joins the likes of Stevie Wonder, Mariah Carey, Sade, Annie Lennox, Missy Elliot, Kenneth “Babyface’ Edmonds, Chaka Khan, Bill Withers and more.
(Feature Image Credit: photo by Tinseltown/Shutterstock.com)
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