Wang’s analysis-which used a broader measure of productivity for a much larger group of people-didn’t find anything special about the productivity of middle-aged people. Another analysis of “age-genius curves” for jazz musicians found that musical productivity rises steadily until about the age of 40 and then declines sharply. One famous analysis of scientists and inventors found that their ability to produce Nobel Prize–winning insights and landmark technological contributions peaks between the ages of 35 and 40. The conventional wisdom is that hot streaks happen in our middle age.
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“The more we tried and the more failed attempts we had, the idea of hot streaks seemed very random,” he said.įrom the July 2019 issue: Your professional decline is coming (much) sooner than you think So where do hot streaks come from? And how can each of us plan for one, or two-or 100? Wang spent several years trying to answer that question. Just about everybody has a period in their life when they produce at their best, even if, unlike Aretha, they aren’t pumping out some of the greatest work of the 20th century. “Bursts of high-impact works remarkably universal across diverse domains,” he and his co-authors wrote. The researchers found that almost all of them had clusters of highly successful work, as determined by higher-than-average art-auction prices, IMDb film ratings, or scientific-journal citations. Three years ago, he co-wrote a paper with researchers at Northwestern, the University of Miami, Penn State, and Central European University, in Budapest, that used large data sets to trace the career outputs of more than 20,000 artists, film directors, and scientists. In the past few years, Wang has peeled back the mystery of why these special creativity clusters happen and how individuals and companies can multiply and extend them. “Ninety percent of people have a hot streak in their career,” Wang told me.
The Northwestern University economist Dashun Wang calls these special bursts of creativity “hot streaks”-a term usually reserved for sports.
Aren’t there periods when you feel like you’re effortlessly flourishing at work, while other times you feel incompetent and uninspired? You might recognize these periods of concentrated success among your friends, peers, and competitors too. This is also true of most people-at least on a smaller scale. There are certain spans of time when scientists, artists, and inventors have phenomenal periods of productivity.