It’s never too late for your career to peak

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6 years 2 months ago - 6 years 2 months ago #49 by PABlo

It’s never too late for your career to peak was created by PABlo

Researchers discover that you can do the best work of your professional life at any moment.

Good news: No matter what your age, no matter if it’s your first day on the job or your last years before retirement, you are equally likely to do the best work of your career–to get on a “hot streak.”

The findings are courtesy of a new study in Nature by researchers from Penn State and Northwestern, who analyzed the career-long performance of more than 20,000 scientists, 3,000 artists, and 6,000 filmmakers.
The team assembled a massive database by mining Google Scholar citations, auction prices, and IMDB ratings, which gave the researchers a means to measure popular and commercial success of works, and then ran all of this data through complex statistical models to spot trends.

What they found is pretty extraordinary.

First, they confirmed the existence of a fabled “hot streak” in one’s career–a multiyear period when “winning begets more winnings” and a series of great projects are released in a finite period.
Anywhere from a whopping 80% to 91% of people in the analyzed professions were likely to have at least one hot streak in their career, and a third of the time or less, some people had two hot streaks. (More than two hot streaks was dubbed “rare.”)
Hot streaks peaked at a bit over five years for artists and directors, and just under four years for scientists.
And within these hot streaks, researchers found that the two greatest achievements in someone’s professional life are likely to happen back-to-back.
Secondly, researchers confirmed that hot streaks are equally plausible to occur at any time during your working lifetime, a phenomenon they dubbed the “random impact rule.”
A conventional way of thinking tells us that indeed people tend to do their best work in mid-career, somewhere around in their thirties and forties. But this turns out to be an incomplete reading of the data.
This means, your best work can be, with equal probability, your very first work, very last work, or somewhere in the middle.
Keep going. Don’t give up. Your hot streak may be yet to come.