What Triggers a Career Hot Streak?
Ever wondered what ignites a career hot streak? It's not just about luck or timing. Unravel the mystery as we delve into the factors that can catapult a professional journey from ordinary to extraordinary.
New research reveals a recipe for success
“Hot streaks,” or career-defining periods of unusual success, have been observed in most every creative domain, from Einstein’s “Miracle Year” of groundbreaking discoveries, including the Theory of Relativity, to director Peter Jackson’s box-office-smash Lord of the Rings trilogy.
- No one had found a reliable precedent to these high-success periods until now
- Inspired by a trip to the Van Gogh Museum, Wang designed a study that used AI to analyze millions of works by artists, film directors, and scientists, in search of potential hot-streak-triggering mechanisms
- Across domains, hot streaks are typically preceded by a specific combination of exploration-more diverse work across styles and focus areas-followed by exploitation-a narrower focus on a particular category of work that drives outsized success
Promoting and Supporting Hot Streaks
The research has implications for how individuals and organizations can spur their own hot streaks
- Individuals pursuing any creative endeavor now know that the exploration-exploitation sequence is most likely to lead to a hot streak
- Organizations can also make use of hot-streak insights
- Academic institutions and grantors can analyze professors’ and researchers’ career paths carefully to see who’s more likely to hit a near-term hot streak and support that individual through advancement, funding, or other resources
- Businesses can use this understanding to decide how they manage intellectual property
AI-Driven Analysis
Researchers developed a deep neural network for the three domains of focus
- Paintings
- Film
- Science
- The neural network enabled the researchers to capture each person’s style, areas of focus, and other dimensions related to their career output, to understand how their body of work evolved over time
Recipe for Success
Exploration of creative options followed by exploitation of a specific “lane” of work ultimately leads to greater success
- Only the specific exploration-exploitation sequence led to the highest increase in likelihood of a hot streak
- The study found that the hot-streak area of exploitation usually isn’t the most recent one explored
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