Across a range of creative domains, individual careers are characterized by hot streaks, which are bursts of high-impact works clustered together in close succession. Yet it remains unclear if there are any regularities underlying the beginning of hot streaks. Here, we analyze career histories of artists, film directors, and scientists, and develop deep learning and network science methods to build high-dimensional representations of their creative outputs. We find that across all three domains, individuals tend to explore diverse styles or topics before their hot streak, but become notably more focused after the hot streak begins. Crucially, hot streaks appear to be associated with neither exploration nor exploitation behavior in isolation, but a particular sequence of exploration followed by exploitation, where the transition from exploration to exploitation closely traces the onset of a hot streak. Overall, these results may have implications for identifying and nurturing talents across a wide range of creative domains.

在一系列创意领域中，个人职业的特点是热门，即一系列高影响力的作品紧密相连。然而，目前还不清楚这种热潮的开始是否存在任何规律性。在这里，我们分析艺术家、电影导演和科学家的职业史，并开发深度学习和网络科学方法来构建他们创意输出的高维表示。我们发现，在这三个领域中，人们在热潮开始前倾向于探索不同的风格或主题，但在热潮开始后，他们的注意力明显变得更加集中。至关重要的是，热点似乎既不是与孤立的探索行为也不是与开发行为相关，而是与探索和开发之后的特定序列相关，其中从探索到开发的转变密切跟踪了热点的开始。总体而言，这些结果可能对识别和培养广泛创意领域的人才产生影响。