Success and luck in creative careers

Abstract

Luck is considered to be a crucial ingredient to achieve impact in all creative domains, despite their diversity. For instance, in science, the movie industry, music, and art, the occurrence of the highest impact work and of a hot streak within a creative career are very difficult to predict. Are there domains that are more prone to luck than others? Here, we provide new insights on the role of randomness in impact in creative careers in two ways: (i) we systematically untangle luck and individual ability to generate impact in the movie, music, and book industries, and in science, and compare the luck factor between these fields; (ii) we show the limited predictive power of collaboration networks to predict career hits. Taken together, our analysis suggests that luck consistently affects career impact across all considered sectors and improves our understanding in pinpointing the key elements in the prediction of success.We compiled four data sets and individual careers across the movie, music, and book industries, and across scientific fields, covering overall 28 different types of creative domains:1. We mined the Internet Movie Database (IMDb [26]) and compiled a data set of 803,013 individuals in the movie industry working as movie directors, producers, art directors, soundtrack composers, and scriptwriters, altogether contributing to 1,297,275 movies.

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