When it comes to creative careers, success can be hard to achieve and even harder to define. But what if there were a magic formula that could increase your odds of a creative breakthrough?

A new study suggests that this magic formula may well exist. The secret to creativity lies in hitting “hot streaks,” or bursts of repeated successes, like Jackson Pollock’s “drip paintings” begun in the late 1940s, or Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the early 2000s. Published in Nature, the study explores exactly what people do before and during a hot streak. Using artificial intelligence to comb through rich datasets related to artists, film directors, and scientists, the researchers identified a pattern that is present across all three fields. The study author believes it could apply to designers, too.

The pattern goes something like this: Artists experiment with myriad formats, styles, and ideas for months, sometimes years, before they zero in on one of those experiments. According to the study, that becomes the hot streak.

Take abstract artist Jackson Pollock, most famous for his “drip paintings,” the majority of which were produced during his “drip period” from 1947 to 1950. What was he doing right before? Dabbling in drawing, printmaking, and surrealist paintings of humans, animals, and nature.

What the two men have in common is that their hot streak was sparked by what the study references as exploration, followed by exploitation. “Before a hot streak, you’re unusually exploratory, then when a hot streak begins, you’re unusually more likely to focus on this one area,” says Dashun Wang, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who led the study.

To understand the underlying dynamics of people’s careers, Wang and his team needed a lot of data. For film directors, they turned to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which includes datasets on 79,000 films by almost 4,500 directors. For scientists, they analyzed the career histories of over 20,000 scientists from the Web of Science and Google Scholar. And for artists, they collected over 800,000 images of visual arts from museum and gallery collections, covering the career histories of over 2,000 artists, like Pollock and Vincent van Gogh. They then used AI and image recognition to mine those images, identify different art styles, and trace their evolution over the course of the artists’ careers.

The pattern they discovered can be understood as a sort of magic formula, where the order of the ingredients—exploration, then exploitation—is crucial. By exploration, Wang means trying new things, experimenting with different painting styles or movie genres. And by exploitation, he means a moment of intense focus where Pollock and Jackson did little else but hone their craft and develop their expertise.

In a previous study published in 2018, Wang and his colleagues found that hot streaks usually last four to five years. “Most people have just one hot streak,” he says. And while the common perception was that hot streaks occur mid-career, he says it can happen at any point in your life—as long as you follow this exact pattern.

This means two things. One, you can’t just keep exploring until you hit a gold mine. And two, you can’t dive straight into something without trying out different things first. Well, you can, but your chances for a hot streak would be significantly reduced. Indeed, Wang says, individuals who have only focused on one side of their craft—either solely exploring or solely exploiting—haven’t reached a hot streak.

“What this tells me is that you can’t just start your career, then specialize,” Wang says. “Analysis tells me that exploitation in the absence of great ideas is less likely to be productive. What you need is to think about exploration beforehand.” He cites professional tennis player Roger Federer, who played badminton, basketball, and cricket before turning to tennis. Interestingly, a 2015 report by the International Olympic Committee confirmed that coaches should avoid sports specialization at an early age because “diverse athletic exposure and sport sampling enhance motor development and athletic capacity.”

* * *