Taylor Swift revealed a secret she learned from watching a television show, and she credits it with helping to guide her wildly successful career.

She says in a new interview for GQ that she learned it watching the VH1 documentary series “Behind the Music.” Swift, 25, is interviewed by Chuck Klosterman in the cover story for the magazine.

She tells Klosterman: “I used to watch ‘Behind the Music’ every day. When other kids were watching normal shows, I’d watch ‘Behind the Music.’ And I would see these bands that were doing so well, and I’d wonder what went wrong. I thought about this a lot.”

The pop superstar says she discovered a common element in the undoing of successful artists.

“What I established in my brain was that a lack of self-awareness was always the downfall,” she says in the interview. “That was always the catalyst for the loss of relevance and the loss of ambition and the loss of great art. So self-awareness has been such a huge part of what I try to achieve on a daily basis. It’s less about reputation management and strategy and vanity than it is about trying to desperately preserve self-awareness, since that seems to be the first thing to go out the door when people find success.”