Skip to content

← Home
GOATs

Katsushika Hokusai

The artist who got better at seventy

Why your best work isn't tied to your age · 13 min

Katsushika Hokusai designed the Great Wave at about seventy, after a decade of grief, debt and a possible stroke, and then wrote that nothing he drew before seventy was worth notice. Was he right? What studies of tens of thousands of careers show about when a person's best work comes, why hot streaks follow exploring then narrowing, and how to keep your best work ahead of you.

Takeaways

  • Katsushika Hokusai designed the Great Wave at about seventy, after a decade of loss, debt and illness. Already famous, he later wrote that nothing he drew before seventy was worthy of notice.
  • In a study of more than 10,000 scientists with careers of at least twenty years, a person's most-cited paper was as likely to be their first as their last. In nearly 30,000 careers in art, film and science, about nine in ten people had a hot streak, and it could come early, middle or late.
  • Hot streaks tended to follow a phase of exploring different styles or topics, then narrowing to one. The pattern comes from people with long careers, is correlational and is not a promise.
  • This week: name your count (finished works in the last year), your phase (exploring or narrowing) and your next level.

Chapters

  1. The wave at seventy0:17
  2. The myth of the early peak2:23
  3. Explore, then narrow4:14
  4. Too late, or too scattered6:56
  5. Hear it done8:14
  6. Build yours9:30
  7. The answer11:12

References

  1. British Museum — A timeline of Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai(2021)
  2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art — The Great Wave: Anatomy of an Icon
  3. Nippon.com — Beyond the Great Wave: Hokusai's "Deep Old Age" at the British Museum(2017)
  4. Sinatra, R., Wang, D., Deville, P., Song, C., & Barabási, A.-L. — Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact(2016)
  5. Liu, L., Wang, Y., Sinatra, R., Giles, C. L., Song, C., & Wang, D. — Hot streaks in artistic, cultural, and scientific careers(2018)
  6. Liu, L., Dehmamy, N., Chown, J., Giles, C. L., & Wang, D. — Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers(2021)
  7. Wikipedia — One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (colophon translation)(2026)
  8. Wikipedia — Aizuri-e (Prussian blue in ukiyo-e)(2026)