Taylor Swift Is Still Intimidated by the Fear of Being Average

“I’m intimidated by the fear of being average," she said.

It sounds like the sort of thing Swift might have said to explain how she became the biggest pop star in the world this year. In fact, she said it when she was all of 16 years old.

Swift had just released her self-titled debut album and was sitting across from a reporter who had interviewed every icon of country music from Dolly Parton to Willie Nelson. But if she was nervous for her first major interview, this girl with a twang and tangles of curly hair didn’t show it. Stardom was one thing she did not fear.

“Not by any measure," she said that day in 2006. “If you have a calling for it and are ready for it, more power to you. For me, the time is right."

And the time was definitely right for her this year.

Did anybody in any business have a better 2023?

Her earthshaking, record-smashing Eras Tour sold more than $1 billion of tickets, printing so much money that even the Federal Reserve was impressed. She boosted the economy by filling stadiums, hotels and restaurants with Swifties of all ages each time she invaded a new city. When the movie version of her concert arrived in theaters, it beat “Mission: Impossible" and “Indiana Jones" at the U.S. box office. The most popular artist on Apple Music and Spotify, she provided her fans with new ways to spend money every few weeks, and she even managed to create a lucrative market for beaded friendship bracelets. Also, in her free time, she went to NFL games and made America’s biggest sport even bigger.

But there was one more thing that Taylor Swift sold to adoring crowds around the world this year: ambition.

It’s her defining trait. At a time when ambition has become contrarian, there was something not just defiant but inspiring about her fierce determination, the animating force of Swift’s career since the very beginning.

“I’m a big advocate for not hiding your enthusiasm for things," she said last year in her New York University commencement address. “Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth. The people who wanted it the least were the ones I wanted to date and be friends with in high school. The people who want it the most are the people I now hire to work for my company."

To understand why she was unstoppable this year, it’s worth flashing back to Swift’s early years—her formative era. Even before she had released a single album, Swift was unapologetically ambitious. She was a teenager who knew what she wanted and how to make it happen.

She also knew that her success in the music business would be as much about her music as her business.

She has combined artistic genius with corporate savvy for as long as she can remember—and even before she was born. Swift has said there are two reasons she was called Taylor: because of James Taylor and because her mother felt it would help to have a gender-neutral name atop her résumé and business cards. Her father was a stockbroker, and when teachers asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, a young Taylor Swift stood out in her classroom of aspiring ballerinas and astronauts.

“I’m going to be a financial adviser!" she declared.

Then she realized some bigger dreams of hers.

She was 10 years old when she decided she was going to be a country-music singer. Before long she was knocking on doors in Nashville with a demo CD of her LeAnn Rimes and The Chicks covers—and a pitch for Music Row.

“Hi, I’m Taylor, I’m 11, and I want a record deal," she said.

When industry executives made the terrible mistake of not taking her seriously, the girl who described herself as the most competitive person she knew took matters into her own hands.

She returned home to Pennsylvania, learned the 12-string guitar and practiced until her bleeding fingers had to be taped so she could keep playing. She began writing songs after school and before it was time for homework. She scribbled down unforgettable lyrics on the pages of her spiral-bound notebooks and Kleenex tissues. And she came up with the idea for “Tim McGraw," the first track on her first album, a song that she’ll be playing for the rest of her life, while she was in freshman math class.

The remarkable part about everything that happened next is that it was not remotely surprising.

Once she had some music to play, she made sure people would listen. She lugged around equipment to perform her first concerts for garden clubs and Boy Scout troops. She sent handwritten thank-you notes to the radio programmers who put her songs on the air, as my colleague Anne Steele reported, and she went out of her way to remember details about the spouses and children of the executives she dealt with.

Forget what she wrote in her classic song “Fifteen": Count to ten, take it in/This is life before you know who you’re gonna be.

Taylor Swift knew precisely who she was gonna be.

“I was always very calculated about it," she told Country Weekly magazine in 2007. “I would think about exactly how I was going to get there—not just how it would feel to be there."

There is really only one way to find out whether that sort of teenage drive translates to adult success: by following a lot of people for a very long time. One such longitudinal study is the National Child Development Study, which set out to track British children born during one week in 1958.

They have been interviewed at regular intervals throughout their lives—including when they were 16 and 33.

That happens to be exactly how old Swift was when she released her debut album and when she embarked on the Eras Tour.

When the participants in the study were 16, they were asked a useful question: What would you like to be your first job? By the time they were 33, their hopes had become hard data. Most of them didn’t grow up to do the stuff they imagined when they were teenagers. But researchers did find something predictive and powerful about childhood ambition: It turns out more than half of the 33-year-old healthcare professionals had achieved their 16-year-old goals.

That is, there were some people who found their purpose early in life. They understood what they wanted to do and they actually did it.

Which makes them just like Swift.

Her teenage ambitions were so grandiose and her will to accomplish them so irrepressible that her family made a smart investment: The Swifts moved to Nashville for Taylor to pursue a career in country music.

“My big dream is to look out into a crowd of thousands of people and have them singing the words to my songs," the unknown teenager said in a 2006 documentary, which aired as she was preparing to release her first record. “That, to me, would just be everything I’ve ever hoped for."

She long ago got everything she’d ever hoped for. This was the year that Swift reached heights that not even she was ambitious enough to imagine.

And when she returned to Nashville for the Eras Tour on a rainy night last spring, there was nothing average about the way she danced in a storm in her best dress.

She looked fearless.

Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com