The Groove Issue 53 - How To Step Into A Hot Streak
Welcome to the 53rd issue of The Groove.
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HOW TO STEP INTO A HOT STREAK
Have you ever been intrigued by that phase in people’s careers where they seem to produce one hit after another? The history of many artists, musicians, scientists, and entrepreneurs is filled with those periods where they seem to be on a series of hot streaks.
Last week, a research project led by Dashun Wang, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, shed some light on these hot streaks.
The study relied on using artificial intelligence to analyze a vast amount of data encompassing hundreds of thousands of art images, studying the lives of 2,000 artists, thousands of IMDB archives and the career histories of over 20,000 scientists from the Web of Science and Google Scholar.
One of the biggest examples in the study is the life of Jackson Pollock. However, the stages that take people to a hot streak are the same regardless of your area of expertise or profession. The good news is that they can happen at any moment of your career.
Jackson Pollock at his Long Island studio, New York, 1950. Picture by Hans Namuth.
Exploration is that phase where you are engaged in experimentation and searching beyond your existing or prior areas of competency.
This is the space where creativity flourishes because it increases the likelihood of stumbling upon a groundbreaking idea through unanticipated combinations of disparate sources.
In the case of Jackson Pollock, he spent the earlier years of his career painting figurative works, landscapes, cubist compositions and even surrealist works.
He also dabbled into paint pouring as one of several techniques on canvases, but he was never committed to just one thing. His exploratory phase lasted approximately 17 years, from 1930 to 1947.
Diversify
Peddler by Jackson Pollock. Pen and ink, watercolor and pencil on paper. Painted in the early 1930s during his exploratory phase.
Nothing creative, innovative, or disruptive ever comes from living in echo chambers, from talking to people who think just like us or from being one-dimensionally focused on just one topic. The study tells us that during the exploratory phase, individuals tend to diversify the topics they work on before a hot streak begins.
Pollock was interested in Native American culture and was heavily influenced by Mexican muralists, particularly José Clemente Orozco. In 1930, he moved to New York and studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League, following the training of this purely figurative artist. Adding more depth and diverse points of view, he spent a summer touring the western United States alongside Benton and a fellow art student.
It was in 1936, after he enrolled in an experimental workshop in New York City conducted by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, that he became acquainted with the use of liquid paint.
Additionally, Pollock was a huge jazz aficionado and played the music loudly and continuously when he was in his studio.
Harness The Power of the Exploitation Phase
Pollock deep in his exploitation phase in 1948. This is when he stepped into a hot streak and realized the new method he had been playing with, using house paint and the movement of his hand and body, was creating a completely different visual language from anything he (or anyone else) had done before.
It is the shift from exploration to exploitation that closely traces the onset of a hot streak.
Both phases need each other - hot streaks won’t happen without an exploration phase filled with diverse experiments followed by an exploitation period.
Exploitation allows you to build knowledge in a particular area and to refine your capabilities over time. This is the phase that takes you deep into a focal area to both establish expertise and foster a reputation related to that expertise.
For Pollock this was the "drip period" between 1947 and 1950. Pollock's technique typically involved pouring paint straight from a can or along a stick onto a canvas lying horizontally on the floor. Nobody was doing such a thing.
After his exploration phase, the artist became fully immersed in his action paintings and he moved his hand at a sufficiently high speed and a sufficiently short height so that the paint flowed and fell in a distinctive form.
Thanks to the drip period, Pollock became famous following a four-page spread in the August 8, 1949 issue of Life Magazine that asked, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”
What the study has given us is context and clarity on how hot streaks happen. The researchers hope that these results may have implications for identifying and nurturing talents across a wide range of creative domai
To celebrate the first anniversary of The Groove, use the code ANNIVERSARY to get 25% off my creativity for business program until September 26, 2021 at 11:59PM EDT.
I loved being a guest of Long Shot Leaders, a podcast hosted by Michael Stein. We covered so much: from how I got my first big break to how I built a seven-figure company from scratch in an unrelated field to what I had been doing 13 years ago. You can listen here.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
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THE EXTRA GROOVE
Read:
Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, by Steven Naifeh
Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiment, by Stefan H. Thomke
Watch:
Jackson Pollock Documentary, produced and directed by Kim Evans
Hot Streaks explained by science, a video by Kellogg School of Management