Intro: In
The Atlantic, Derek Thompson reports on research into
what causes “hot streaks” in careers. “It’s a complicated idea that comes down to three words,” Thompson writes. “
Explore, then exploit.”
There’s a never-ending tension in creative work between “exploring new ideas and exploiting old certainties.”
In
1991, the Stanford Graduate School of Business professor James G. March
published an influential paper,
“Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” which broke down work into two big categories: exploring new ideas and exploiting old certainties. . .
Individuals face the same choice.
SPOILER ALERT: The research suggests something fundamentally hopeful: that periods of failure can be periods of growth, but only if we understand when to shift our work from exploration to exploitation.
If you look around you at this very moment, you will see people in your field who seem wayward and unfocused, and you might assume they’ll always be that way. You will also see people in your field who seem extremely focused and highly successful, and you might make the same assumption. But Wang’s paper asks us to consider the possibility that many of today’s wanderers are also tomorrow’s superstars, just a few months or years away from their own personal hot streak. Periods of exploration can be like winter farming; nothing is visibly growing, but a subterranean process is at work and will in time yield a bounty.
"Albert Einstein in the early 1900s. Aretha Franklin in the 1960s. Steve Jobs in the 2000s. There are certain spans of time when scientists, artists, and inventors have phenomenal periods of productivity.
This is also true of most people—at least on a smaller scale. 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.
The Northwestern University economist Dashun Wang calls these special bursts of creativity “hot streaks”—a term usually reserved for sports. “Ninety percent of people have a hot streak in their career,” Wang told me. “Most people have just one. Some people have two. It’d be nice to have more.”
. . .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. 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. The researchers found that almost all of them had clusters of highly successful work . .
The point is not that exploration is good and exploitation is bad. It’s that all success—career success, corporate thriving, national flourishing—requires that we pay close attention to the interplay between scouting new ideas and pumping established wells. By and large, America seems to suffer from too much exploitation and too little exploration. “We’ve gotten very good at encouraging people to be more and more focused and at penalizing people who wander outside their lane,” Wang said. “I don’t think America is particularly good at rewarding novel thinking.” Indeed, we have a national scouting deficit, because our theories of success emphasize immediate productivity in a way that might obscure the benefits of a little bewilderment and curiosity.
Thompson notes that the same tension exists on the individual level: Do you spend your time exploring new possibilities or do you “shut up and play the hits,” so to speak?
. . .Heraclitus noted that, like with guitar strings, it’s the unique tension in life that creates harmony.
I see this tension between exploring and exploiting not as something to get over or beat, but as a kind of field from which our work emerges.
If an artist is to keep working, they will never resolve this tension, nor will they want to. (See: Milton Glaser on Picasso.)
1. A “hot streak” can’t be due to the will or actions of the artist alone.
When I look at the hot streaks listed by Thompson (“Albert Einstein in the early 1900s. Aretha Franklin in the 1960s. Steve Jobs in the 2000s.”)
Thompson’s piece notes that the “explore, then exploit” theory seems to back up the main idea of David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. . .
In order for artistic or creative work to be “impactful” the conditions must be right. There must be an audience ready to receive the work. The creative person has very little to do with that.
Perhaps the best way to know if it’s time to explore is if the conditions don’t seem ripe. In such winter-like moments, it may be best to disappear and explore. . .
“Periods of exploration can be like winter farming; nothing is visibly growing, but a subterranean process is at work and will in time yield a bounty.”
2. Does “impactful work” really equate to the best work?
I’m always a bit suspicious of the metrics involved in such studies. . .It is merely the work that connected the most with others.
4. The line between exploitation and exploration can be pretty blurry.
5. Is a “hot streak” desirable for the artist?
6. Exploration needs to be funded.
Exploitation mode pays for itself (until it doesn’t) but the exploration mode needs to be paid for up until it pays off. (If it ever does.) One of the great gifts of a major success is that it means you can go away for a while and experiment… if you have the guts to turn your back on the temptation to exploit indefinitely.
7. There’s a micro and macro view of this.
If you zoom in, it’s possible you can do your exploiting and exploration at the same time. I think of John Waters: “I think it up in the morning and I sell it in the afternoon.”
Doing a gig based on what I know in the morning, for example, pays for my afternoon of writing and reading about what I don’t know.
