In the early 1900s, Albert Einstein. In the 1960s, Aretha Franklin. In the 2000s, Steve Jobs. When it comes to scientists, artists and inventors there are times of time when they are at their most productive.
On a smaller scale, this is also true for most people. It’s not uncommon to feel like you’re thriving at work, while at the same time feeling unmotivated and incompetent. Friends, colleagues, and rivals may have experienced similar periods of concentrated achievement.
“Hot streaks” are a word normally reserved for athletics, but Northwestern University economist Dashun Wang uses it to describe these surges of invention. 90% of people have a hot run in their career, Wang said. “For the vast majority of people, there is only one. Some folks have both. The more the merrier.”
To understand why and how these creative clusters form, Wang has spent the last few years unraveling the mysteries of these exceptional clusters. Researchers from Northwestern University, the University of Miami, Penn State and Central European University in Budapest co-wrote a report three years ago that used enormous data sets to trace the career outputs of over 20,000 artists, film makers, and scientists. Art auction prices, IMDb film ratings, or scientific journal citations were used to identify clusters of extremely successful work for nearly all of the researchers. He and his co-authors noted, “Bursts of high-impact works [are] remarkably universal across diverse domains.” Even if they don’t generate as much as Aretha Franklin, nearly everyone has a time in their lives when they are at their creative peak.
As far as I can tell, how do hot streaks begin? And how can any of us plan for one, or two, or even a hundred of us? That question occupied Wang for a long time. His investigation led him to a lot of dead ends. It became increasingly apparent that hot streaks were a fluke the more he attempted and failed to do them.
Hot streaks are thought to occur in middle age, according to the common thinking. One of the most well-known studies of scientists and inventors found that their propensity to make Nobel Prize–winning ideas and breakthrough technological achievements peaked between 35 and 40. “Age-genius curve” analyses for jazz performers have indicated that musical productivity rises until roughly the age of 40, then decreases rapidly.
Wang’s investigation, which employed a broader measure of productivity for a far bigger group of people, found nothing unusual about the productivity of middle-aged persons. Rather, hot streaks occurred equally among artists and scientists in their early, middle, and late careers. There were other possibilities that didn’t pan up. As far as he knows, going hot is all about numbers, and hot streaks happen when you put in the most effort. This could be because of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour-of-practice rule, which states that it takes 10,000 hours of practice for a person to become an expert at something. Or perhaps we’re more effective when we’re working with superstars in our field, and our hot streaks are more about who else we’re working with. But there was no explanation that suited the evidence.
Until this year, Summer of 2014 saw the publication of Wang and his co-authors’ first major theory on the formation of hot streaks in nature. This is a difficult concept that boils down to the following three words: First, explore, then exploit.
“Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning” by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor James G. March was a major publication in the field of organizational learning in 1991. Assume you’re the owner of a vehicle company. Investing in future advancements like self-driving software or finding new methods to generate cash from current technology and materials is a yearly decision. This year’s profit takes a nosedive as a result of excessive R&D spending. If you focus too much on refining old product lines, you’ll be outpaced by a newcomer in 10 years.
The same decision is faced by everyone. Each week, I have the freedom to write about whatever I want. I’m a big fan of new ideas and new businesses. It’s also likely that I’ll do a poor job or that no one will be interested in reading about my new topic. In the meantime, I get a lot of attention when I write on the future of employment. Whether or not I pursue a profession as a full-time work futurist, should I let my curiosity to roam into other disciplines that may lead to dead ends for my career? Exploration vs. exploitation: it’s the same old struggle.
Wang’s most recent study indicated that artists and scientists tend to experiment with a wide range of styles or topics before they go on a run of hot streaks. Afterwards, there is a creatively fruitful phase of concentrate. As Wang put it: “Our data shows that people ought to explore a lot of things at work, deliberate about the best match for their skills, and then exploit what they’ve learned.” The commencement of a hot streak was most accurately predicted by following this same pattern: exploration, followed by exploitation.
It was Jackson Pollock who Wang pointed to as an example of how to apply paint to canvas in a non-traditional way. To begin with, Pollock experimented with a wide range of techniques, including abstract art and surrealism influenced by Marc Chagall’s work in the early 1930s. The “drip style” suddenly appeared in the mid-40s, and he painted in it for roughly four years before abandoning it. “The greatest living American painter?” was the question Life magazine asked him in 1949, making him a household name. Pollock abruptly abandoned his drip method the following year, at the height of his fame, and began experimenting anew, until his death.
Exploration and exploitation, at least for artists, film directors, and scientists, do little good on their own. It is less likely than expected that exploitation will coincide with a hot streak when it occurs on its own, according to Wang and his co-authors. The likelihood of a hot streak increases dramatically only when times of trial and error are followed immediately by periods of focused focus.
If we know when to change from exploration to exploitation, we may turn our failures into periods of growth, according to the research. People in your field may appear disoriented and distracted to you right now, and you may assume they’ll always be that way. You may make the same assumption if you observe others in your profession who appear to be laser-focused and tremendously successful. Although many wanderers today are tomorrow’s stars, Wang’s research encourages us to think about the likelihood that these same wanderers are just months or years away from their own particular hot streak. During periods of research, nothing is visible, but a subterranean process is at work and will eventually give a bounteous harvest.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World was written by journalist David Epstein several years ago to suggest that early specialization was not a good approach for flourishing in a world of complicated challenges that defy quick answers. The best strategy, according to Epstein, is to take a range of ideas and combine them to come up with fresh solutions. That’s what Wang’s research seems to support. Despite the fact that hot streaks are evidence of specialization, specialization alone does not lead to hot streaks. This generation’s most successful explorers and exploiters were once the most accomplished in the past.
Exploration’s benefits extend beyond the classroom. People who change jobs more frequently in their early careers had better earnings and incomes during their peak working years, according to a 2014 study on youth employment. Even though job-hopping may appear to be the labor of an unreliable dilettante, it can really increase your chances of finding a job with both meaning and money. This is another another example of the long-term benefits of exploring.
Lastly, Wang and his colleagues criticize America’s education and innovation systems as a whole. Young children are encouraged to specialize in extracurricular activities that promise to create child prodigies, such as athletics and music. Our obsession with specialization is reducing our collective potential, since long periods of trial and error are necessary for the most creative work. Many investigations have indicated that the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are biased against research concepts that are radically different from the norm. When it comes to frontiers of knowledge like scientific funding, Americans are more interested in doing more with what we currently know rather than increasing our knowledge base.
That exploration and exploitation are mutually exclusive, however, is not the point. To succeed in any endeavor, whether it’s your profession or your business or your country, you need to keep an eye on the interplay between scouting fresh ideas and pumping established wells. A common problem in the United States is an overreliance on extraction and underinvestment in exploration. According to Wang, “We’ve gotten very good at encouraging people to focus on their work and penalizing those who wander outside their area.” ‘I don’t believe that the United States is especially excellent at rewarding novel ideas.'” So we have a nationwide shortage of scouts, and this is due to the fact that we place too much emphasis on short-term results rather than long-term benefits.
