CONCEPT
The Career Trajectory
Simonton's inverted-U curve of creative productivity across a career — rising sharply in early years, peaking at a domain-specific age, declining gradually thereafter, with AI threatening to reshape the curve into something flatter and longer.
The career trajectory is the empirical regularity Simonton documented across thousands of creators in dozens of domains: productivity rises steeply in the early career as training matures and agenda solidifies, reaches a peak whose timing varies by field, and declines gradually thereafter. Lyric poets and mathematicians peak early, historians and novelists peak later, but the inverted-U shape holds with a consistency that gives it the quality of a natural law. Crucially, the equal-odds baseline predicts that quality tracks productivity — the periods of highest output are also the periods of highest eminence, not because the creator is better during peak years but because more attempts at the same probability produce more hits.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The career trajectory liberates creative decline from the Romantic narrative of burning brightest in youth and slowly dimming. In Simonton's framework, decline is not loss of creative power but reduction in output — driven by health, by competing