Success and luck in creative careers

TL;DR

This paper investigates the role of luck versus individual ability in determining impact across creative careers in science, entertainment, and literature, revealing luck's significant influence and limited predictability of success through networks.

Contribution

It systematically compares luck and ability in various creative fields and assesses the predictive power of collaboration networks for career success.

Findings

Luck significantly influences impact across all sectors.

Collaboration networks have limited predictive power.

Impact is highly unpredictable due to randomness.

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.