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Bytram (from IRC) writes:

International research team discovers career hot streaks occur in science, art and film:

A team of researchers [...] examined the works of nearly 30,000 scientists, artists and film directors to learn if high-impact works in those fields came in streaks.

According to Lu Liu, a doctoral student in the College of IST and member of the research team, they found a universal pattern.

"Around 90 percent of professionals in those industries have at least one hot hand, and some of them have two or even three," she said.

[...] Liu says that there are two previous schools of thought regarding hot streaks in individual careers. According to the "Matthew effect," the more famous you become, the more likely you'll have success later, which supports the existence of a hot streak. The other school of thought -- the random impact rule -- implies that the success of a career is primarily random and is primarily driven by levels of productivity.

"Our findings provide a different point of view regarding individual careers," said Liu. "We found a period when an individual performs better than his normal career, and that the timing of a hot streak is random."

The researchers also wanted to learn if individuals were more productive during their hot streak periods, which last an average of four to five years. Unexpectedly, they were not.

[...] "Individuals show no detectable change in productivity during hot streaks, despite the fact that their outputs in this period are significantly better than the median, suggesting that there is an endogenous shift in individual creativity when the hot streak occurs," wrote the team in their paper.

[...] As the research shows that hot streaks do in fact exist in creative careers, the researchers hope to apply the research methods to more domains, including musicians, inventors and entrepreneurs.

Original Submission