 Everyone experiences his or her own version of stuckness and it can vary dramatically like there There's this interesting work looking at careers and looking at the golden period in careers Almost every career has at least one hot streak one golden period, which is really nice to know But it's incredibly difficult to predict whether it's going to happen at the beginning of the career So called springtime careers at the end of the career or winter career or in the middle of the career a summertime career Or in some cases a perennial career where there are many of these kinds of hot streaks So the question is how do you engineer those? How do you inject them into your career those hot streaks? The point of that research is essentially that there is no one-size-fits-all, you know, that You know, there's always this work saying, you know And this makes total sense that over time you develop certain faculties and skills that make you better equipped as you get older And as you get more senior to deal with whatever curveballs arrive and so you're going to be better at things the more senior you are then there's other research that says actually it's It's really just about being a bit of a sort of young prodigy that The best people and whatever pursuit it is are just really good at it from the start So that's the good news that if you've had a hot streak, there's another one around the corner But you can manufacture them basically and what this this research is really fascinating it looked at painters and filmmakers and People in a number of scientists as well people in all sorts of different domains And it basically described these two processes that come from evolutionary biology known as exploitation and exploration Exploration is when imagine you kind of turn a corner and this is hunter-gatherer era You're looking for food you turn a corner and there's this huge landscape a hundred acres in front of you You have no idea where the food is you don't know where the animals are you don't know where the berries are You can kind of rove around and roam around try and find You know patches that might look fruitful But you can't also be digging really deep, you know many layers deep into the soil and going into caves and whatever You have to either use this strategy of exploration where you go broad or you can use the opposite strategy Which is exploitation, which is where you say hey, there's a fruitful patch over there I'm going to explore it to the ends of the earth, you know, I'm going to dig really deep Looks like there might be some berries there But I really want to make sure or there's a cave there There might be some animals that I that I'm interested in I need to you know spend a bit of time exploring So exploration is going broad exploitation is going deep But you can only do one of them at a time to find a hot streak The suggestion is that if things are going really well, you should keep exploiting But if you feel like you keep hitting roadblocks, it's time to explore again And one of the nice rules of thumb in working out whether you're exploring or exploiting Is if an opportunity lands on your lap, do you say yes or do you say no During periods of exploration everything should be a yes You're voracious. You're hungry. You're omnivorous. You eat everything. You say yes to everything I want to try everything. I actually I give a talk to freshman at nyu and that's what we talk about So you say yes to everything And that's what college should be But then at some point if you say yes to everything You're never going to really explore the thing that you're doing and you're never going to hit that hot streak So, you know, if you look at people like Jackson Pollock the painter He became very well known for his drip technique There's one technique that he pioneered that was different from anything anyone else was doing But if you look at his work five years before he hit that that period He was doing Everything under the sun. He was trying a hundred different techniques. It's kind of fascinating how Diverse his work was before he hit that hot streak period And so the key is to jump between exploring and exploiting that whenever you hit a roadblock you go back to exploring You wait till you hit sort of a fruitful patch or you say I'm going to explore for six months or a year or two years and then move back to exploitation Or four days of the week. I'm going to explore the fifth days for exploitation or whatever you want to do but those two Explore then exploit that's the route to to hot streaks and careers. That's what a lot of the research shows