The Tate Modern In London hosted its first ever solo exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work earlier this year.

One of the main focus points of the exhibition was a single year in the life of the great artist, who in 1932, had just turned 50

At that time he was a celebrated genius and living his best life in chauffeured splendour in France, about to break the record for a sale by a living artist (56 000 francs).

Picasso was on a career high, and over the course of the year, he produced 100 paintings, drawings and sculptures, reports Quartz.

He also was living with an art world that questioned his relevance, carrying on an affair with the 22-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter that was about to destroy his marriage, and coping with the slow breaking apart of his home country of Spain, where the ground was being laid for civil war.

Despite the chaos in his personal life, Picasso’s career at this point could only be described as on a hot streak.

Researchers from Penn State and Northwestern universities have described a hot streak as a “specific period during which an individual’s performance is substantially better than his or her typical performance” and also, more loosely, as “winning begets more winnings.” They set out to understand more about these periods and recently published their conclusions in Nature.

Lu Liu, Yang Wang, Roberta Sinatra, C. Lee Giles, Chaoming Song, and Dashun Wang analyzed the careers of more than 20,000 scientists, 3,000 artists, and 6,000 filmmakers, using public databases like box office, Google Scholar citations, and IMDB ratings as ways to objectively measure critical and commercial successes, and then running the data through statistical modeling.

The data revealed that between 80% and 90% of people in the aforementioned professions were likely to experience at least one hot streak in their careers. In a limited number of cases (roughly a third), they had two hot streaks – this, however, was exceedingly rare.

“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,” the researchers concluded. “We find this phenomenon to be remarkably universal across diverse domains: hot streaks are ubiquitous yet usually unique across different careers.”

On average, a hot streak lasted just under four years for scientists, and just over five for artists and directors.

There is also good news for anyone angsting over not have achieved anything yet despite being in your 30s.

Many think that our best work comes in our 30s and 40s. “But this turns out to be an incomplete reading of the data,” says Northwestern’s Wang in Fast Company.

Look at Picasso. He was 50 when he got going on his second hot streak. The first produced his acclaimed ‘blue period’.

There is hope for you, still. If you’ve already peaked, you’d better hope you’re one of those rare two-timers.

[source:quartz]