How much of a person’s career success is the result of sheer luck? About half, depending on what field you’re in.
Roberta Sinatra at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and her colleagues set out to measure what role luck and individual ability play in the success of creative works, including films, songs, books and scientific research papers. They used this as a proxy for career success.
The researchers looked at works from more than 4 million people across the publishing, film and music industries, as well as 15 scientific fields.
They quantified impact based on the number of reviews that movies or books had accrued on IMBD or Goodreads respectively, and the number of times songs had been played on LastFM. The team also looked at 87.4 million research papers on the Web of Science database, measuring an article’s impact based on the number of times it was cited within a decade of being published.
By looking at the random fluctuations in the timing and magnitude of successful work, the team was able to come up with a crude estimate of luck different careers typically involve, using a measure called a randomness index, R. An entirely luck-based activity such as roulette would have an R score of 1, for example.Can you beat your genes? Twin tales from science, medicine and life with a clone: Chris van Tulleken at New Scientist Live
Luck appeared to have a relatively consistent effect across all the fields they studied, with a maximum difference of just 5 per cent.
In the music industry, electronic music artists needed the most luck (0.546) and classical musicians the least (0.507), while in the film industry movie producers needed the most luck (0.545). Within science, success in astronomy involved the most luck (0.55) while computer science was associated with the least (0.517).
The aim was to create a model of the ups and downs of success within a career, says Sinatra. The differences in luck between industries should be taken with a grain of salt, she says.
Previous research has found that the biggest success – a hit song, a bestselling book – of a person’s career randomly occurs at any time.
To account for individual ability, the team also used a factor, Q, to capture the typical impact of a person’s work throughout their career.
Individuals with higher Q scores were more consistently successful. Christopher Nolan was the film director and screenwriter with the highest Q score.
Reference: arxiv.org/abs/1909.07956
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2217628-around-half-of-your-chances-of-career-success-comes-down-to-sheer-luck/#ixzz60jGc4iH4