Ponderings On Being A PRO Or Amateur, And An Attractive Alternative
I was eating lunch while walking the streets with coding colleagues once when one of them said, “It’s amazing that we get paid to do something we’d otherwise do for free.” A woman behind us chuckled when she heard that.
There is a comics-related forum where someone has been quite annoying, claiming to be a professional even though they haven’t been able to get their work published or sold for a very long time. They published a few comics a while ago, but they are now being ghosted by publishers (which isn’t surprising, given his personality). They’re also a hack, coming up with unoriginal ideas because they think it will do well in the market. They clearly don’t enjoy creating something original and desperately try to reach the status of being a “pro”.
I sold my first computer games when I was fourteen. Was I already a “pro”? Or did I become a “pro” when I got my first regular job coding twelve years later, even though I wasn’t suddenly a better coder?
I haven’t programmed for money for quite a while now, but I code a lot still, witness my website. So am I a pro or an amateur?
I had to think about these things right after reading the excellent book “1-Page Marketing Plan” by Allan Dib. One thing he says up front is that his marketing approach only works if you really want to make money with it. I understand why some of his ideas only work then: if you use ads, how are you going to measure success? One way to do that is to see whether the profit you made from one ad is higher than the cost of that ad. A money printing machine.
Marketing is apparently an example of something you can only really become good at if you want to make money with it.
Which dooms me if I want to promote “Practice Drawing This”, because I don’t want to make money with it.
Having fun with it versus making money with it. Or both. Or neither.
Some things will only work when you are having fun with them. You can only become good at most skills if you enjoy doing them. Coding, art, and all creative endeavors fall under that.
When things are time-intensive, as making art is, then money enters the equation, too, because you do need to make a living to survive, and if you put most of your time into a paying job, you have less time to create art. This is the classic idea about amateurs: they do it alongside a paying job. And the classic idea of being a pro is that you make money with it, the implication being that pros are supposedly better at it because they spend more time on it, and the proof is that people are even willing to pay for their work.
Einstein did his theorizing next to his day job as a patent clerk. By the above definition, he was an “amateur scientist.”
Kafka was a lawyer and insurance officer, and he didn’t publish most of his work during his lifetime. Van Gogh did not sell his work during his life.
Vivian Maier was a nanny her whole life, and only after she died did they discover her vast trove of 150,000 photos she had taken, and she’s now considered one of the greatest street photographers of the 20th century.
Amateurs, right?
Being a pro or being an amateur, self-proclaimed or not, does not necessarily have to say anything about the quality of your output.
But there is also a third category, a type of people I call “Aristocrats”. They can put as much time into an activity as a pro while making as little as an amateur. This is a surprisingly large group. Most, if not all, children and retirees don’t have to make money. All online education platforms are leaving money on the table because they don’t have courses targeted at retirees and people in midlife looking for a new purpose or meaning in life, who are exploring art to play that role. They sometimes have deeper pockets. They behave very differently online.
There’s a cool thing Aristocrats can do: they can try things no one else is trying simply because it hasn’t proven to be something you can make money with. They can afford to boldly venture into uncharted territory and see what’s there. Most people don’t have the time or money to do that. Cezanne was an “aristocrat.” Most such endeavors will not lead to financial rewards, but following your curiosity can be really rewarding.
People who hold down jobs can be aristocrats too in that sense, creating impressive bodies of work, witness Einstein, Kafka, van Gogh, Vivian Maier. I would think it unfair to call these people “amateurs,” as it suggests their work was of lower quality. And yet, they mostly didn’t get paid for the thing that made them famous.
And then there is the art world: rich people buying art as a status symbol: “Branded collector X has this artist in their collection (because it can help them avoid paying taxes), so therefore I should have it in my collection, too.” Is that what defines quality? Is that what makes an artist “pro”? Or even an “artist”?
Is it about the quality of work, or is it about the money? Because they very obviously don’t always equate.
As you can tell, I have a teeny, tiny bit of a problem with these labels.
Yours sincerely,
Previous article: Is This What The Human Side Of The Web Will Be In The Near future?