Being fully prepared

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.