Taylor Swift offered some sage advice to fellow creators while accepting the Artist of the Year award at the 2026 iHeartRadio Music Awards.
While onstage at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, Calif. Thursday evening, Swift recalled how her hobby of songwriting as a child evolved into a full blown artistic craft.
“I didn’t think I was an artist when I first started doing it,” she shared. “It was a hobby … and then it was my favorite hobby. And then it was what I would like, rush home from school to do. It was like, I can’t wait to get back to my guitar in my room and write a song.”
Swift continued: “When I was 12 years old, I had the luxury of spending thousands of hours working at my craft, practicing, making mistakes through trial and error — and that was all completely unobserved, right? So that was just me and my craft.”
At this moment, Swift felt compelled to speak to the fellow artists and creators in the room, advising them all against online chatter as they pursue their art.
“I’m looking out into this crowd and I’m seeing so many ambitious, cool, smart, awesome people who have dreams,” Swift said. “And like, we live in this world where there’s so much immediate feedback constantly. Like, you get feedback for everything you share with the world now … If I had one hope for you, I would say that I hope that you get to nurture your hobby and your passion — just between you and that craft.”
She added: “Give yourself time to make mistakes. Give yourself time to hone your craft. I’m a firm believer that anything you feed your mind, it will internalize. Anything you feed the internet, it will attempt to kill. And I don’t want that for your dreams.”
Before concluding her speech, Swift took a moment to thank her dedicated Swifties for allowing her “to turn [her] hobby into a love, into a passion, into a dream, into a career.”
Swift didn’t just take home the Artist of the Year award, as she also walked away with seven awards in total, including Pop Album of the Year, Album of the Year, Pop Song of the Year, Best Lyrics, Best Music Video and Favorite Tour Style.
Earlier in the evening, while onstage accepting her other aforementioned awards, Swift shouted out her fiancé, Travis Kelce, for inspiring the album, “The Life of a Showgirl.”
“I think that this album feels very happy and confident and free because that’s the way that I get to feel every single day of my life, because of my fiancé who’s here tonight,” she said. “So thanks for all the vibes. I really just wanted to say thank you also to iHeart and thank you to anyone who cared about ‘The Fate of Ophelia,’ because you made that into the biggest hit of my career, which is crazy at this point.”
Watch Swift’s speeches above.