GOOD IDEAS AND POWER MOVES
GOOD IDEAS AND POWER MOVES
TEN LESSONS FOR SUCCESS FROM TAYLOR SWIFT
SIN É AD O’SULLIVAN
FORMER STRATEGIST, HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL
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I can dedicate this book to none other than the immeasurable number of Swifties who have changed my life by constantly and consistently espousing the Power Moves I discuss henceforth.
In the words of Taylor Alison Swift:
This one is about you, you know who you are. I love you.
If you’re lucky enough to be different, don’t ever change.
Taylor Swift
GOOD IDEAS AND POWER MOVES
INTRODUCTION
THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT TAYLOR SWIFT, OF COURSE. BUT TO really understand what I’ve written in this book, there are a couple of other things you need to understand fi rst . . .
You (yes, you!) Can Work at NASA
When I was a fi fteen-year-old high schooler, I was given the opportunity to travel from Northern Ireland to Houston’s Mission Control on the trip of a lifetime: to Space Camp. I had always had an indiscriminate love for all things in the sky: planes, black holes, Mars rovers, astronomy, and more, so when I heard about the opportunity, I applied straightaway and, to my surprise, made it through the interviews to get a coveted place.
It was next-level amazing!
When I arrived in Houston, I was picked up at the airport by my host family of NASA engineers who happened to live next door to the Johnson Space Center. In fact, and rather unsurprisingly, during
my time at Space Camp I met person after person who worked at NASA.
Like the guy who did the thermal engineering on the astronaut’s space-walk glove. The guy who worked on the new ion-thruster propulsion system. The scuba-diving woman who trained astronauts in the massive underwater mock-up of the International Space Station. I got to sit in the Mission Control Center and talk to the fl ight director once he was fi nished speaking to the astronauts aboard the space station. One of my more daring Space Camp pals managed to bum a cigarette off the college intern who was working on orbital trajectory.
In the evenings, we hung out with the kids of the NASA employees and went around to friends of my host family’s houses for dinner. One of them had a swimming pool, and we had a pool party. Me? In America? Having a pool party? I felt like I was in a TV show!
Once Space Camp sadly concluded, after weeks of sweating in a type of heat and humidity that I had never experienced before, I went back to my home in Northern Ireland just in time to start back at school.
A few months later, the time came to start college applications. For me, deciding what to study was the easiest decision I had ever made. I was going to study aerospace engineering so that I could one day work at NASA. So naturally, when my teachers and friends and even friends of my parents asked me what I wanted to do, I told them as much.
Their reaction?
“Oh. Ummm . . . Sure? Okay.”
I could see in their eyes that what they were really thinking was: “This poor, delusional girl.” I may as well have told them that I wanted to grow up to be the Princess of Genovia. My teachers told me to “apply for something else as well . . . you know . . . just in case.” My
friends sometimes asked me, “But what do you actually want to do?”
And my parents assumed I’d “grow out of it” at some stage.
Anyway, that was a million years ago now.
I did, in fact, study aerospace engineering in Northern Ireland. And then I moved to the United States to study more aerospace engineering at grad school. I specialized in human spacefl ight and got to work with astronauts and mission controllers, and, yes, I got to work on designing space missions for NASA. My good friends became the men and women who designed rovers for other planets, and I even got to be in the Mission Control Center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the Mars Curiosity rover touched down on a planet 200 million kilometers away. My friends would talk about their rocket testing in the same way that other people may talk about football results.
The reason I bring this story up in a book about Taylor Swift is simple.
This book is fundamentally about looking at what Taylor has done (and continues to do), and then saying: You, too, can do this.
Which in theory, and at least to me, sounds perfectly normal.
But over the years I’ve come to realize that, to so many people, this is something that sounds totally batshit crazy.
“You think you can be like Taylor Swift?”
“You think you can work at NASA?”
Unfortunately, a lot of people are absolutely convinced that these types of achievements are beyond the realm of what is possible for mere mortals to achieve.
But what if I told you that the people achieving such things are only mere mortals?
You see, what I was so incredibly lucky to learn and internalize when I was fi fteen, and the one thing that ultimately had more
impact on my life than anything else, can be summarized by one word: agency.
It’s the idea that we do have control over the outcomes of our life, and in fact, far more control than you may even realize. Agency is the premise that if you want to do something, you can actually just go right ahead and do it without seeking permission or waiting for it to happen to you.
If anybody can do anything, then why not me? Or why not you?
My preconceptions of NASA were probably similar to what most people think of the place: secretive, full of the world’s smartest people and famous astronauts, and totally, 100 percent unachievable as a career choice.
But when I actually spent time there as a student, I realized this couldn’t have been further from the reality.
Sure, everybody was really smart. But aside from the one in every few hundred people who were modern-day Einsteins, most people had gone to college, studied engineering or science, achieved average to good grades, and worked their way into NASA in the same way that you might work your way into any other engineering job.
What separated those who worked on space missions instead of designing bridges was not their intelligence but simply their interest in space missions instead of bridges.
NASA engineers were just normal people. They got up in the morning after hitting the snooze button too many times, rolled into work, did some really cool stuff, and then went home again for dinner with the family. If anything, I was slightly disappointed by just how normal (mundane?) even the astronauts’ lives were.
During a recent podcast interview, I was asked the following question: “What is it that really separates NASA engineers from normal engineers?”
My response: NASA engineers are normal engineers; they just work on slightly different things.
Astronauts are just regular people, it turns out, with a government job (albeit an extremely cool and prestigious one). And when I shyly told these astronauts to their faces that I, too, would like to be an astronaut, you know what they said?
“Great! So here’s what you need to do. Let me know if you need any help along the way.”
Once I got home from Space Camp, I felt like my life had permanently changed. I also felt like I had been lied to my whole life: People pretended that becoming an astronaut was impossible, but it’s clearly not. I had met real-life astronauts, and they had told me how I could become one too.
What other things were people lying about being impossible to do?
On Being Fearless
Two weeks after I started my undergraduate engineering course in Northern Ireland, Taylor Swift released her second studio album, Fearless. I sang “Love Story” with my best friend, Kirsty, when we won our fi rst-year Aircraft Design competition. Taylor then released Red when I started learning how to drive, the CD of which was the only one I had in my car as I drove (quite badly!) between Belfast and Dublin to visit my fi rst serious boyfriend.
My move to the United States coincided with her release of the “Welcome to New York” anthem on her 1989 album, and I wrote at least fifty thousand words of my grad school dissertation on spaceflight listening to “Blank Space.” I fell in love with a new boyfriend over “You Are in Love.”
In the midst of “Wildest Dreams,” I emailed the CEO of a large spacefl ight company one day out of the blue to ask her how I could, one day, get her job, and I fi nally got a response: “You need to go and get an MBA.” And so, after quickly googling what an MBA was (a master’s in business administration, it turned out), I moved to Boston to start a new era at Harvard Business School.
Once there, I parted ways with my previously mentioned boyfriend, rather fittingly, to the Reputation soundtrack.
However, around that time, I happened to fall in love in my professional life, unexpectedly, with something new: business and finance. I decided not to return to spaceflight at NASA after my MBA but to remain in Boston at Harvard, researching innovation, ideas, finance, and strategy.
As with most of her fans, Taylor Swift has been a massive part of my personal story for as long as I can remember. This boyfriend; that album. This place; that song. Nearly every Swiftie I’ve ever met is able to write their personal story through Taylor Swift’s discography, just like I’ve done.
At Harvard Business School, however, I started to think about Taylor Swift’s journey through a professional lens too. Over time, I had become more and more obsessed with the thing I learned when I was fi fteen: How do seemingly normal people do extraordinary things? It was a question that consistently reared its head when I thought about my hobbies, my interests, my research on economics and innovation, and even when I listened to my favorite musician— Taylor Swift.
I started cold-calling people who were at the top of their field and asking them basic questions about their lives. Why do you do the same training, over and over again, every day? Don’t you get bored of running? Why did you choose to work on this album instead of
that one? Did you know that this start-up was going to be successful when you invested millions of dollars into it? And most important: How did you become so successful?
As this happened, I noticed three key things.
The fi rst is that when you reach out to people when you’re genuinely trying to learn about them and their decision-making process, it’s kind of wild how often they will actually respond to you in a very positive way. In my experience, most people have replied to me, which initially came as a shock (so yes, send that email or make that call!).
The second thing is that nearly every one of these people told me the same thing, regardless of whether they were an athlete, a performing artist, a chef, an investor, or in some other niche. And that thing was:
“Doing what I do is not at all impossible. It’s actually not even complicated. But it does take a lot of hard work.”
The hunch I had as a fi fteen-year-old was correct—you can literally do anything that you put your mind to, especially if somebody shows you which path to take and you work harder than most other people.
The third thing I noticed was that around this time Taylor Swift was becoming an increasingly large part of my thinking around the hows and the whys of outsize success. And this coincided, in particular, with a period of my professional life when I was looking, nearly in desperation, for guidance from a role model who espoused my values and whose story I could connect with.
When I wanted to attempt new, risky projects or take a different, more creative approach with my work, there were a million people I could have spoken to who would have told me to “wait until you’re more established,” or said it was a “great idea, but why not do it the conventional way fi rst.”
And every single time I was on the fence about trying something bigger or riskier, I would look at Taylor Swift and think, Fuck it.
There’s an expression that gets thrown around a lot, especially about women in their careers: “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.” As much as people tend to use this expression off handedly, I want to double down on how true it actually is for a moment.
It was only after I met NASA engineers that I realized I, too, could be one; it was only after I spoke to several writers that I realized I, too, could one day write a book; and it was only because I watched Taylor Swift for more than a decade as I was making my own careerdefi ning decisions that I realized that there’s more than one way for me to do this whole career thing successfully.
As someone who internalized at a young age that I could replicate other people’s success by understanding their actions and decisions and then copying them, I became fi xated on watching and learning from other people. And for an absurdly long amount of time, one of those people was and continues to be Taylor Swift. For both personal and professional guidance.
I like to think that it’s not a coincidence that Taylor released Fearless at the same time that I entered into my career and my adulthood, because, thanks to her, this is how I’ve consistently tried to act in both: fearlessly.
I have spent the majority of my professional life at Harvard Business School, thinking deeply about business, economics, and strategy across an unimaginable number of industries and business types and working with the superstar CEOs who impact and influence our lives. Working alongside the most famous economists and strategists, I’ve
spent more than a decade analyzing products, companies, and economies. Creating financial, operational, and corporate strategy with the leaders, politicians, and CEOs who head them up has formed most of my research.
Through that research, I’ll try to answer certain questions, like: Is this investment likely to return capital to investors? Is this CEO the right person for the job? Is this industry about to get disrupted? Should the company release a new product this year or next year?
I’ve been extremely lucky that through this work I’ve been able to gain valuable experience from the largest and most impressive businesses in the coolest industries and gotten to meet some of the most infamous and outstanding investors and business executives.
Unsurprisingly, all these industries, businesses, executives, and investors have been written about. A lot. Some even have whole textbooks outlining what they’re doing and why.
And then I think about one of the most, if not the most, consequential businessperson of my era: Taylor Swift, the CEO.
As an asset, this pop star has higher returns than 99.9 percent of hedge funds. She is a better strategist than most successful corporate CEOs, and she is the only person that the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank track with precision because she can move fi nancial markets faster than high-frequency traders. Just this morning, I read an article in the Financial Times about how investors in electric vehicles are closely analyzing Taylor in an attempt to hedge their investments. There is no economy or industry that, regardless of how distant it seems from pop music, is not impacted by her.
I wrote this book because she is somebody it is clearly very important to understand.
However, mostly I wrote it because I know people can learn as
much as I do from Taylor Swift as both a CEO and a leader, and as a business and a brand that has grown into a multibillion-dollar global enterprise.
In this book I have outlined not only how Taylor operates but, more important, how she has used this operational strategy to usher in more success than nearly every other executive today.
In the same way that the astronauts told the fi fteen-year-old me, “This is what you need to do to become an astronaut,” I’ve outlined the lessons that I’ve spent nearly a decade reverse- engineering by carefully analyzing Taylor and her business from afar. These are the lessons I use when I think about my own life— personal and professional—since I became fearless more than two decades ago. It’s the book I wish had existed during the many ups and downs and inside-outs of my own path.
In her song “The Man,” Taylor herself compels her fans to wonder: Would she ever, despite the crazy and unique business and leadership path that she has forged, be talked about for more than what she wore, who she was dating, and whether she deserved any of her success?
Could any of that be “separated from my good ideas and power moves ”?
Well, this book does just that. I am convinced that in dissecting her good ideas and power moves, you will learn just as much as I did about how to live fearlessly, personally and professionally.
People pretend that it’s impossible to do extraordinary things, but that’s simply not true. I know this because I’ve met the normal people who break world records, produce chart-topping music, win Nobel Prizes, and more.
Everybody, it turns out, can be like Taylor Swift. You just need to know how . . .
POWER MOVE ONE
BE A UNICORN
BEING LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT IS NOT IMPOSSIBLE. HOWEVER, IT TURNS out that it’s not exactly easy.
“But what happens if you get sick?” I asked my friend, a chef of a two-Michelin-star restaurant, over dinner.
It’s a fascinating question, because it really highlighted the difference between our lives. If I were to get sick, I would send a few emails to postpone meetings, and when I’m feeling a bit better, I might even attempt to do some work from bed. This is the ultimate luxury of being a white-collar, work-from-anywhere worker.
My sister, who works in a hospital where she must be physically present to do her job, can even phone in sick and have someone cover her shift. Is it ideal? No. But is it catastrophic? Also no.
A two-Michelin-star restaurant, however, is slightly different.
Six-month waiting lists, for both lunch and dinner, and a small, ninja-like team of the most skilled chefs in the world performing what is essentially microsurgery on food to produce an extremely complex menu at high speed.
When your customers are spending hundreds of dollars per
meal, at a minimum, the lowest acceptable outcome is complete perfection.
“Sick? You don’t get sick. I haven’t had a sick day in years,” the chef tells me, baffled by the question in the fi rst place. “It’s not an option.”
Of the estimated 15 million restaurants in the world, only 0.018 percent of them hold one or more Michelin stars. Of that, only 650 two- or three-Michelin-star restaurants exist today, putting my friend in the top 0.004 percent of chefs in the world.
I thought about a trip I took last winter, a four-hour fl ight each way with a three-day vacation in between. And afterward, a fiveweek battle with a chest and sinus infection that I defi nitely caught at the airport. If I were a chef, would I have not traveled so that I didn’t get sick? Or would I have ignored being sick?
Then I thought about Taylor Swift’s eighteen-month-long Eras Tour across five continents, consisting of 149 shows in some of the most extreme weather conditions on earth. What the hell? Just how?
I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere in the middle of her Brazilian shows, she performed her three-and-a-half-hour, ten-thousandcalories-burning show, boarded her plane still in her show attire, flew for ten hours to New York, and was papped the next day up to her usual shenanigans of recording a new album, hanging out with celebrity friends, and being the ultimate woman-about-town.
I say this as someone who is exactly the same age as Taylor Swift and would love going to the pub in pajamas to be normalized: How does she do it?
How does she not get sick? How does she have the energy? Has anybody actually verified that she doesn’t have a twin?
To put this into the context of where I, part of the Taylor-aged cohort, am, one of my friends texted me yesterday asking me to congratulate her for wearing a bra for the fi rst time in a week.
“I know I’m going on that stage whether I’m sick, injured, heartbroken, uncomfortable, or stressed. That’s part of my identity as a human being now. If someone buys a ticket to my show, I’m going to play it unless we have some sort of force majeure,” Taylor said in a mid–Eras Tour interview.
I’m not entirely sure what the correct single metric for trying to measure Taylor’s success as a singer-songwriter would be, and it’s likely that the topic could be a long book on its own, but consider that in 2022, thirty-six million songs were released to the public. Figuring out which artist is best among those releasing these millions of songs is complex, but just bear with me when I make the assumption that across these releases, Taylor comes up top.
That means she is 1/ 36,000 ,000. Which means she is in the top 0.0000028 percent of artists releasing music. And that is just wild.
So yeah, we live in a world where there are two types of people: the normal people who try their best to wear bras to work and the Taylor Swifts. The chefs of two-Michelin-star restaurants. The prima ballerinas. The Navy SEALs. The Nobel Prize winners. The statistical outliers.
The Unicorns.
Unicorns Are Normal People Too
There is a huge paradox regarding people who do extraordinary things. In one way, they are just ordinary people like you and me who just so happen to be doing extraordinary things. Sometimes I like to think that even someone as powerful as the president of the United
States puts on his pajamas, gets into bed at night, and thinks, “Thank god. Another day at the office done,” before watching cat videos on an anonymous account on Twitter.
I happen to be writing this book from a little village in Ireland that houses a beautiful castle, where celebrities sometimes visit. One day, I walked into the tiny corner pub only to be told that I had just missed a global music superstar. “I don’t see the big deal,” the bar lady retorted across the pub. “He’s just another man who sits on the toilet every day, bored like the rest of us.”
In fact, some people have not subscribed to the celebrity-culture obsession that has permeated our lives, including most of my friends and family, who are blissfully unaware of any “famous” people and are unable to see Unicorns as anything but ordinary people. The “extraordinary” things they do are seen as nothing more than part of their job, no different from being a builder or an accountant.
And this is, in fact, probably a good way to think about them.
I’ve had the benefit of meeting, working with, and even befriending many Unicorns, and they are indeed normal people in the ways that make people human . They are insecure. They are scared. They worry about people not liking them. They also fi nd it hard to get dates (I know!). They, too, will stare at their phones wondering if the person they like will ever text them back. They have complex friends and families. They start their day by waking up, jumping in the shower, and wondering whether or not they can get away with using dry shampoo instead of the real stuff.
And this is largely who we think about when we think about Taylor Swift. Or at least this is the way most people have been thinking about her for the last twentyish years. Because she is the ultimate girl next door.
She is a beautiful, ultratalented, successful, fun, witty billionaire
that everybody wants to date. But is there anything more relatable than the fact that she still happens to get ghosted by her dates like the rest of us?
The depths of her perceived—and, to a large degree her real normalcy will be a central theme in later discussions in this book on her strategy, her engagement, and why we all still seem to love her so much despite her success (yes, we typically dislike successful people, and greatly despise successful women).
I mean, being “normal” is her thing. Normality is her multibilliondollar business. There’s nobody who does “normal” better than the most famous and influential billionaire alive, even with her private jets.
But before we get into the specifics of her normalcy, I want to take a chapter, just one, to talk about the ways in which the ordinary people who do extraordinary things are actually pretty damn extraordinary.
Because until you have a good sense of what makes a Unicorn extraordinary, and until you really understand their superpower, it’s going to be hard to contextualize just how insanely talented and special they are, and how downright difficult everything they do is.
Or learn how to actually do extraordinary things yourself, as an ordinary person.
You see, all the things that Taylor manages to do, and all her Power Moves and good ideas and superstardom and cunning cleverness, come from the little bit of “extraordinary” that lives within her.
People simply don’t know how to identify Unicorns or to understand what makes them special, and the reason that ordinary people fi nd it so hard to become Unicorns is that they don’t know how to. I mean, how is Taylor Swift able to do the frankly insane things she does? It feels like a question that is too large to answer, and throughout this book I’ll try to explain.
But when you step back and really look at, spend time with, and study the very ordinary people who do extraordinary things, the statistical outliers, you realize that they all share common traits, characteristics, and beliefs that allow them to transcend ordinariness to achieve Unicornness.
I call them common traits for the simple reason that you or I could, if we really wanted, achieve them too.
One of the most dangerous beliefs in the world is one that I hear constantly from many people, including the students I teach, and is something that I catch myself sometimes repeating inwardly and outwardly: I can’t be a Unicorn.
You’d be amazed to learn that the only real difference between someone wondering whether they’ll wear a bra this week and Taylor Swift performing sellout shows around the globe is that Taylor figured out how to be a Unicorn, whereas others didn’t.
Now, I’m not saying that what Taylor is doing is easy—quite the opposite.
But to the extent that all of us have enormous potential to change the world in little or large ways, we’re also all guilty of leaving immense amounts of that potential unfulfi lled. Even Taylor Swift knows this: When she got the news that Reputation was not being nominated for any Grammys, she said, with tears in her eyes, “I just need to make a better record.”
And even after more than thirty years as one of the best chefs in the world, my friend tells me that “every day it’s about just trying to make one small thing better, because there’s still a very long way to go.”
But looking at what Unicorns do in order to reach the extraordinary outcomes they achieve is, if nothing else, helpful for guiding us closer to being extraordinary.