Songfacts®:

• This ode to ambition finds Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds striving to be the best regardless of the obstacles.
  
  Whatever it takes
  You take me to the top
  I'm ready for whatever it takes
  'Cause I love the adrenaline in my veins
  
  Reynolds wants to accomplish something with his life and is ready to Evolve.
• The song was produced by Joel Little, who is best known as Lorde's key man on her debut album, Pure Heroine.
• Guitarist Wayne Sermon told HMV.com this was the Evolve track that took the longest to get right. He explained:
  
  "Dan had the first and pre-chorus really quickly. But the chorus wasn't right. We went through a ton of ideas and versions before we found the right chord progression and the right melody. Sometimes it's quick, sometimes it's not. The process is never the same twice."
• The Conservative Political Action Conference is an annual event attended by American conservative activists and elected officials. When Imagine Dragons heard that the CPAC had been using this song on its website, they successfully reached out to get it taken down.
• The song is about recovering from past pain. "It's about overcoming my own self-confidence issues that I've had since I was young," Dan Reynolds told ABC Radio.
  
  "I think that title probably gives away that song more than any song on Evolve," he added. "Since I was young... I was taught that you could do whatever you could dream of, you just had to work harder than everybody else and you had to never give up. It's a cliché. But there's a reason it's a cliché."
• This won for Best Rock Video at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards.