Success is hard to achieve in creative careers, even harder than that is to define it. However, there are few people who make a creative breakthrough and this leaves one question: how is this breakthrough achieved? What is the magical formula for achieving this success? It might look that there is no magic formula but a recent study suggests otherwise.
According to the study, the creative artist needs to hit hot streaks for achieving the repeated success and the same is evident from the drip paintings by Jackson Pollock and also in, ‘The Lord of the Rings by Peter Jackson. A study titled, “Understand the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural and scientific careers” has examined what different artists do before and during the hot streak. Artificial intelligence was used to analyze the datasets of artists, film directors, scientists, researchers and even designers who work on diverse designs like Mehndi Design.
What Is The Secret Formula?
The pattern which was pointed out by the study threw light on the fact that most of such brilliant artists focused on experimentation that dealt with different formats, ideas and styles, sometimes not just for months but for years before choosing one experimentation style which then ultimately becomes their hot steak. For instance, a writer could experiment in writing English stories or Hindi Status before deciding what to work with. The same can be said for movie directors too. Now take for example The Lord of the Rings trilogy directed by Peter Jackson which finally became his hot streak. Before this movie, he tried his hands on a wide number of film genres like horror-comedy and biography. The study also pointed out that first, the creators explore and then engage themselves in exploitation in which the artist focuses on one area.
The Database Of The Study
The data collected for the study to get to the findings included 79, 000 films by approximately 4, 500 directors, career histories of more than 20, 000 science from Google Scholar and Web of Science. In addition to including the artists, the researchers collected data from more than 2, 000 artists and more than 800, 000 images from gallery and museum collections. For understanding the different styles of art, tracking the evolution and mining the images, AI was used. Finally, after the findings, Wang could confidently say that two ingredients present in the magical formula included first exploration and then exploitation. Exploration referred to experimentation and exploitation referred to intense focus.
Wang carried out a similar study in 2018 with his colleagues which indicated that most creative people have one hot streak. However, these hot streaks last for around four to five years. One might ask when one will encounter their hot streaks? Many people assume that hot streaks can only be hit in mid-career. However, this assumption is cleared by Wang as he stated that hot streaks can happen anytime and there is no fixed time frame when one will discover it.
How To Find The Hot Streak?
Now that the secret formula is out, one might wonder how to reach the hot streak? Before that, it is important to understand that focusing simply on exploring or exploiting will not bring the result. Both exploration and exploitation should be carried out. For instance, Roger Federer, the renowned tennis player tried his hands on cricket, basketball and badminton before settling for tennis. In fact, the International Olympic Committee in 2015 in a report said that at the early stage, sports specialization should be avoided by the coaches and the player should be exposed to different sports as it increases the athletic capacity and further helps the player to develop their motor muscles. Even though the study brings the magic formula for the people, it failed to find when someone should stop the exploration and focus on specialization. This is something which now the creative people have to figure out on their own. Instead of being clueless, finally one now has the idea that they need to explore as many things as possible before finding what they enjoy doing. It further needs to be pointed out that even though a huge amount of data was collected for the study to see what made artists successful, it should be noted that success is subjective and it means different things for different people.