The hot streak—loosely defined as ‘winning begets more winnings’—highlights a specific period during which an individual’s performance is substantially better than his or her typical performance. Although hot streaks have been widely debated in sports1,2, gambling3–5 and financial markets6,7 over the past several decades, little is known about whether they apply to individual careers. Here, building on rich literature on the lifecycle of creativity8–22, we collected large-scale career histories of individual artists, film directors and scientists, tracing the artworks, films and scientific publications they produced. We find that, across all three domains, hit works within a career show a high degree of temporal regularity, with each career being characterized by bursts of high-impact works occurring in sequence. We demonstrate that these observations can be explained by a simple hot-streak model, allowing us to probe quantitatively the hot streak phenomenon governing individual careers. We find this phenomemon to be remarkably universal across diverse domains: hot streaks are ubiquitous yet usually unique across different careers. The hot streak emerges randomly within an individual’s sequence of works, is temporally localized, and is not associated with any detectable change in productivity. We show that, because works produced during hot streaks garner substantially more impact, the uncovered hot streaks fundamentally drive the collective impact of an individual, and ignoring this leads us to systematically overestimate or underestimate the future impact of a career. These results not only deepen our quantitative understanding of patterns that govern individual ingenuity and success, but also may have implications for identifying and nurturing individuals whose work will have lasting impact.The career trajectories of around 30,000 artists, film directors and scientists show that individuals in each domain have ‘hot streaks’ during which their works have increased impact, despite showing no increase in productivity.

中文翻译：

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艺术、文化和科学事业的热门连胜

连续上垒——粗略地定义为“赢得更多奖金”——突出显示了一个特定时期，在此期间个人的表现明显好于他或她的典型表现。尽管在过去的几十年里，热门连胜在体育 1,2、赌博 3-5 和金融市场 6,7 中引起了广泛的争论，但人们对它们是否适用于个人职业知之甚少。在这里，我们以关于创造力生命周期的丰富文献为基础 8-22，收集了个体艺术家、电影导演和科学家的大规模职业历史，追溯了他们制作的艺术作品、电影和科学出版物。我们发现，在所有三个领域中，职业中的热门作品都表现出高度的时间规律性，每个职业的特点是依次出现高影响力作品的爆发。我们证明了这些观察结果可以用一个简单的连续热模型来解释，这使我们能够定量地探讨支配个人职业生涯的连续热现象。我们发现这个现象在不同的​​领域中非常普遍：热门连胜无处不在，但在不同的职业中通常是独一无二的。热潮随机出现在个人的作品序列中，具有时间局部性，并且与生产力的任何可检测变化无关。我们表明，由于在热潮期间创作的作品获得了更大的影响，未被发现的热潮从根本上推动了个人的集体影响，而忽视这一点会导致我们系统地高估或低估未来职业的影响。