When You’re Hot, You’re Hot: Career Successes Come in Clusters

They looked at scientists (citations), artists (painting prices), and film directors (imdb ratings). The question is whether the works that they're looking at are actually independent.

For scientists, it's rather unlikely that, having discovered a rich vein of research, a scientist would put out a single perfect paper and then never revisit the topic. Instead, I'd expect several papers exploring aspects of the research, which would get cited where those aspects are applicable; that pattern would produce several highly cited papers which look like a 'hot streak' but are actually just one piece of work.

For film directors, the Peter Jackson example the article gives is similar: the three Lord of the Rings movies are a 'hot streak' consisting of the director repeatedly putting together the same actors playing the same characters in the same story.

For artists, they're using the art market, in which prices are determined by the opinions of critics, gallerists, and other experts herding towards a consensus about importance and quality, as a proxy for quality. A conclusion that "the stuff artist X was doing during this period was important" would naturally produce a cluster of works escalating in price.

My expectation would be that after such effects are accounted for Einstein's anno mirablis that produced four transformative and unrelated papers would once again appear to be extremely atypical.

I have had two successes that kicked off hot-streaks and they each came after several years of thrashing around, learning the space and material with which to work. I am in the middle (hopefully) of a new thrashing phase, lots of core competency being built up, (waxonwaxoff) some minor successes, and a whole lot of dissatisfaction.

The more I look around the more I feel every one has at least the following phases in their career- Fall, Struggle, Rise, Plateau. The thing is the order is not guaranteed. But the phases come in parcels of decades.

The best is the order I mentioned. Sometimes the order is brutal. You go like Rise, Plateau, Struggle, Fall. The best years happen in early life- Like 20's. You go through it assuming this is how its going to be all life, don't invest or save up. And then reach 40's and realize you have another 40 to go and regardless of how hard you work, You have to suffer through the remainder.

In some people's case the big success comes in the last decade of their working career.

Either way the most important to note is, that luck goes around. No one remains lucky forever. One must be worried if start tossing a coin, and head comes up straight 100 times.

Got 4000 stars on GitHub and suddendly a publisher offered me a book deal.

Had some interviews and people told me, they already knew me from the news, where I got to via the 4k GitHub stars.

Works that might have ignored or simply missed earlier now get more attention.

And works that might have failed due to lack of resources now have a better shot.

I would be quite surprised if patterns like Einstein’s annus mirabelus are actually the norm, with four largely unrelated breakthroughs in the same year.

In my own life, I can witness similar events in collegues and myself. It may also be that others take a "hot streak" train of thought, style, premise, and once it becomes common place, that hot streak or cluster ceases to be relevant.