Taylor Swift’s Person of the Year Interview Is Full of Lessons We’ll Remember for Life

by - January 11, 2024

 If you’re reading this, it’s likely that Taylor Swift wasn’t just TIME’s Person of the Year—she was yours, too. I know she was most certainly mine, as not only was she my most-played artist of 2023 (proud 1% of listeners over here), but she’s also definitely the reason why not a single one of my top artists was a man. And if you went through 2023 up until this point thinking that Taylor Swift wasn’t shaping your life in extreme and tangible ways, Sam Lansky’s profile of Swift will force you to think again.

Here at The Everygirl, we’re all about the ~takeaways~ from cultural moments like the Barbie movie or Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour, which is why when I shed real tears reading Lansky’s profile, I immediately started making mental notes. Here are six lessons that we can take away from Taylor Swift’s Person of the Year profile that, fingers crossed, will ensure there are many more female Persons of the Year in the future.

Have you ever felt the need to completely reinvent yourself? Beyond that, have you ever actually reinvented yourself? In the age of Taylor Swift, it’s no wonder if the answer to one or both of those questions is yes. Lansky’s profile exposes Swift’s very deliberate act of self-replacement, the near-constant self-reinvention process throughout her career that brought the Eras that we have come to know and love. 

When Swift realized that record labels were trying to replace her after her infamous 2009 VMAs win, she decided that she would instead replace herself with a new version of herself. Even when it was confusing to fans, Swift continued to genre-leap with each new season of her career.

However, what set Swift apart in 2023 as the Person of the Year was not the reinvention itself, but her response to her own reinvention. The economic and social gargantuan that was the Eras Tour came from Swift’s ability to look back on each phase of her career with compᴀssion and enthusiasm—in spite of the fact that, as she revealed in the TIME profile, she did not initially want to re-record her masters. In our own lives, emulating this love for past versions of ourselves is essential for moving forward.

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