If you’re in the business of making things, success can be hard to accomplish and much harder to describe. Nonetheless, what if there was a secret formula that may boost your chances of making a creative leap forward?
According to a recent study, there may be a magic recipe out there. Getting on a “hot streak,” or a run of recurrent triumphs, like Jackson Pollock’s “drip paintings” in the late 1940s or Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the early 2000s, is the key to creativity. People’s pre-and post-hot streak activities are examined in this Nature study. The researchers discovered a common thread in datasets relating to artists, filmmakers, and scientists by employing artificial intelligence. Researchers believe that it might also be used by designers.
After experimenting with a wide range of formats, styles, and concepts for months or even years, an artist eventually settles on one of those experiments. Those are the findings of the study, which indicate a hot streak.
If you’re looking for an example of abstract artist Jackson Pollock’s “drip paintings,” look no farther than his “drip period” between 1947 and 1950. What had he been doing before this? Surrealist paintings of humans, animals, and nature, as well as sketching, printmaking, and collage.
Film director Peter Jackson is another example. From 2001 to 2003, he had a three-year hot streak with The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The films he made prior to this included both biographical and horror-comedy genres.
According to the research, exploration and exploitation are the two things that set these two individuals on fire. An expert in management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University who led the study argues that “before a hot streak begins, you’re unusually exploratory; then when a hot streak begins, you’re unusually more likely to focus on this one area,” he adds.
Many people’s professions can be explained by Wang and his team’s extensive data collection. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which has data on 79,000 films by over 4,500 filmmakers, was used by film directors. They looked at the bios of over 20,000 scientists from the Web of Science and Google Scholar to get a sense of their trajectory as a scientist. More than 2,000 artists, including Jackson Pollock and Vincent van Gogh, were documented in over 800,000 photos from museum and gallery collections. They then employed AI and image recognition to mine those photographs, identify different painting styles, and chart their progression over the span of the artist’s careers. ‘
As a type of magic formula, the order of the ingredients—exploration, then exploitation—is critical in the pattern they uncovered. Wang defines exploration as doing new things, such as experimenting with new art styles or movie genres. And by exploitation, he refers to a period of great concentration in which Pollock and Jackson focused solely on perfecting their technique.
Previously, Wang and his colleagues observed that hot streaks often last between four and five years. In his opinion, most people just have one hot streak. He believes that, contrary to popular belief, a hot streak can occur at any time in your life—as long as you follow the identical pattern.
Basically, this means that two things are true. In the first place, it’s not possible to keep going till you find a gold mine. Second, you can’t just dive into a new endeavor without first testing the waters. You could, but your odds of getting on a winning streak would be greatly diminished. A hot streak has never been achieved by someone who has just focused on one aspect of their craft, Wang argues.
Wang concludes, “What this teaches me is that you can’t just start your job and then specialize. An analysis informs me that exploitation without outstanding ideas is less likely to be successful. To get the most out of your trip, you need to plan ahead of time.” A professional tennis player who played badminton, basketball, and cricket before switching to tennis is an example of someone who can play multiple sports. Coaches should avoid sports specialization at an early age since “diverse athletic exposure and sport sampling enhance motor development and athletic capacity,” according to a 2015 report by the International Olympic Committee.
How can we tell if we’ve hit a hot streak in the present if the study was done in the past? Moreover, how can one tell when it’s time to stop exploring and start practicing? While the study doesn’t go into this in detail, Wang explains that they utilized a variety of criteria to evaluate the importance of people’s contributions. The value of an artist’s work was determined by how much it sold at auction. IMDb ratings were used to evaluate film directors. Researchers were judged on the number of papers they published and the number of citations they had.
This isn’t a perfect solution, but Wang admits that it is better than nothing. The auction price, he claims, is the “most consistent” way to measure the success of an artwork (besides being mentioned in books or on display in museums). Are paintings only considered good if they are sold? Is a product’s success determined just by whether or not it receives an award?
It’s not just artists and scientists who have benefited from Wang’s research; other experts have documented the hot streak phenomena in a variety of fields, from music to online media to startups, since the 2018 study.
People who develop and those who assist in the creation of new things could benefit from this study, according to Wang. This might be funding agencies in the scientific realm, but every sector has its own movers and shakers. According to Wang, there are “decision-makers and policymakers who can help increase the odds of success for these professionals” in every creative field. It’s my hope that this article will help you think about how to best support an individual’s extraordinarily successful period of time.”
