#27. In Praise of Amateurism

While professionals do it for a living, amateurs live to do it.

Dear friends,

I began thinking about amateurism after coming across an article by Natalia Beard (2022) with the title I have chosen for this letter. Beard, a journalist by profession, describes her experience of rediscovering, at age 31, her love of the piano and her subsequent amateur pursuit of it, after 10 years away from it. Concerning the distinction between amateurism and professionalism she wrote:

“The problem with the dominant taxonomy for artists — professional or amateur — is not only that it’s a reductive binary but that it forces comparison: the amateur becomes less than a professional, amateurism the unsatisfying endpoint of a journey terminated early. How many times I’ve heard versions of ‘I knew I’d never become a professional’ as the reason for abandoning a cherished pursuit in youth that’s later regretted. When we denigrate the amateur, we dismiss the fact that the origin of the word ‘amateur’ is the Latin verb ‘amare’ — to love. Our passions are what make up our inner life, a place of consolation where things of meaning are stored and preserved, ready to be drawn on whenever we want or need them. They should be cultivated at all costs.”

In Letter #26, I suggested that we too often identify ourselves by our vocations and not enough by our avocations. Should we call Natalia Beard a journalist, or should we call her a pianist? My guess is she is happy being called either or both, but if it had to be one or the other, I’d put my money on pianist.

Natalia Beard, from Financial Times article

Amateurs Compared to Professionals

What is the difference between an amateur and a professional? Too often we think of it as a matter of competence. The professional is viewed as highly competent; the amateur is not. But the real differences lie on dimensions of motivation and attitude, not competence.

Here I’ll ignore the fuzziness of all such concepts, the fact that professionals can in some ways be amateurs and vice versa, and contrast them in admittedly stereotypical terms. These contrasts were inspired in part by my reading of an article by the prominent anthropologist Tim Ingold (2020), in which he regrets that his own field has become too professionalized at the expense of amateurism.

Professionals do it for a living; amateurs live to do it.

The dictionary distinction between the professional and amateur is that the former is paid for the activity and the latter engages in it for love (enjoyment, meaning, satisfaction) and is not paid. Of course, professionals may also love what they are doing, but research suggests that when one’s livelihood depends on an activity the orientation tends to change, toward thinking of it as “work,” not play, and toward confining it to those hours for which one is paid. Amateurs, on the other hand, are likely to engage in the activity whenever they are free to do so. For the professional the activity is a way of making a living. For the amateur it is a way of living.

Professionals work within boundaries; amateurs wander freely.

Professionals, to be perceived as professionals and earn their pay, must operate within certain boundaries. There are specific tasks to be done, to which they must fix their attention. This is obviously true for professions such as plumber, doctor, lawyer, or accountant; but it is also true, to perhaps a lesser degree, for professional artists and scholars.

Artists, to be professionals, must stay within boundaries of what is marketable. Scholars, to obtain and maintain a university position, must work within boundaries of currently acceptable scholarship for their discipline. Amateurs, in contrast, can create and think in whatever ways they please. Sometimes this leads to nonsense (though who is to judge that?), but sometimes it leads to what is later called genius. Thinking out of the box is risky for the professional. It is natural for the amateur.

When I resigned 22 years ago from my paid position as a university professor and accepted an unpaid position as “research professor,” with title but no responsibilities, my self-identity changed from that of professional professor to amateur professor (now there’s a contradiction in terms!). As I explained in Letter S3, that transition led me to be a more productive and creative scholar than I had been before, because I could focus only on what I deemed interesting and valuable and ignore the rest. I could “profess” to whatever audiences found interest in what I had to say, not to captive audiences of students in classes or professors at academic conferences.

Professionals know; amateurs learn.

The word “profess” originates from the Latin word “professus,” which means public declaration. Professionals, then, are people paid for knowledge worth listening to or acting upon. Professionals are generally certified in some formal way as knowledgeable, by currently accepted standards, in their field of endeavor. They are paid for their knowledge and expertise.

Amateurs, in contrast, are not certified as knowing. They may or may not know, and their “knowledge” may or may not be trustworthy, but they are always seeking. They are striving to know, in their own ways of knowing, ways that are meaningful to them but may or may not be meaningful to others. Amateurs are always learning, never at a steady state of knowing.

It’s interesting to note that professor and professional share the same root, profess. Professors are paid for declaring their knowledge, which, according to Ingold (2020), may be why so many professors (and perhaps other professionals as well) suffer from imposture syndrome. Do we ever know?

Professionals aim to separate thought and action from emotion; amateurs do not.

To be a professional is to be objective, impassionate. To be an amateur, almost by definition, is to be passionate. Because of their emotional involvement, amateurs are often activists, working for some cause consistent with their passion. In contrast, professionals become suspect if they become activists, for fear they are losing their objectivity and allowing passion to outweigh logic.

When I turned in my position as a professional professor and became an amateur one, I freed myself for activism. I am not only researching and writing about children’s needs for more play and freedom; I am actively working for causes to promote such ends.

Final Thoughts

In my last letter—Letter S4—I asked readers to describe briefly their own primary amateur activity. If you are engaged in such an activity, I would appreciate your going back to that letter to describe the activity in the comments section, if you haven’t already done so. At some point soon I’ll study those comments for insights that may contribute to a future letter.

In my next letter I plan to continue the theme of amateurism by describing some revolutionary discoveries or insights that were made by now-famous scientists who were amateurs at the time. I will suggest that they could break conventional thinking and achieve such insights in part because they were amateurs, not professionals.

If you are enjoying these letters, please recommend them to others who might enjoy them. If you are not yet a subscriber, please subscribe. If you have a free subscription, please consider upgrading to paid—at just $50 for a year. I would much appreciate that. All funds I receive through paid subscriptions are used to support nonprofit organizations I’m involved with that are aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Beard, Natalia (2022). In praise of amateurism—a pianist’s story. Financial Times Dec. 29, 2022.

Ingold, Tim (2020). In praise of amateurs. Ethnos 86, 153-172.