Amateur vs. Amateurish
I have a friend who plays music with laudable dedication and self-discipline, but who staunchly refuses to call himself a musician. I used to give him a hard time about that, until I started to understand what he means.
I play the fiddle and the Scottish bagpipes, but I didn’t start putting concerted effort into those instruments until I was in my 40s. I picked up a bagpipe practice chanter for the first time during that, my fifth decade on earth, and didn’t breathe into a proper set of bagpipes until months later. A fair bunch of years since then, I play only as well as you might expect a person with my experience to play. I drew a bow across fiddle strings for the first time when I was about 10, and I mucked about with the instrument occasionally for a couple of years, but then I put the fiddle in its case, pushed the case out of sight, and didn’t open it again until shortly before I started up with the pipes. All these years later, I’m still a novice fiddle player, a fervent novice, but a novice nonetheless. The word musician just feels like it should describe someone who plays at a high level, maybe someone who plays professionally. Folks such as me and my pal acknowledge we’re amateurs.
Whether or not we dither over which labels to wear, there are indeed droves of us amateurs who are devoted to our pursuits. Avidly practicing and performing our arts and crafts are characterizing elements of us. The ways in which our devotion manifests are infinitely varied, and our skills vary as widely, but devotion is the commonality that unites us.
Not all amateurs are cast from the same mold though. Some are devoted amateurs, while others are amateurs whose relationships with their chosen activities are intermittent and noncommittal. Put another way, there’s a difference between being an amateur and being amateurish.
If you look up the word amateur in the dictionary, the results will support that dichotomy. There often are two definitions of amateur: one that fleshes out as something like unpaid, or non-professional; and another that uses terms such as incompetent or inept. Most of us who don’t pursue our interests for paychecks still want to be associated with the first definition, not the second. Call us amateurs, and we’ll agree happily. Call us amateurish, and we bristle.
For us serious and devoted amateurs, the fact that we’re not scribbling lots of digits on our tax returns as results of our significant efforts doesn’t diminish our deep personal connections to what we choose to do. If someone dismisses our amateur pursuits by saying, “Oh, so it’s just a hobby,” we may argue. To understand our reasons, it helps to look into the origins of the word amateur itself.
The ancestor of amateur was born in ancient Rome, and like countless other births, this one was a product of love. The Latin verb amare means to love; and amator means in Latin, one who loves. The word has wended its way through the ages, eventually being modified by French speakers to become amateur. English then borrowed it from French. So, it makes sense that many of us amateurs are so attached to our amateur pursuits. It’s because we love them.
Love is a shotgun blast of a word however. Its manifold meanings have been hackneyed and diffused by too many television commercials and greeting cards. To say we dedicated amateurs love our avocations doesn’t shed enough light on the specific reasons we embrace being identified as devotees, but not as mere dabblers. And while I now respond to my friend’s refusal to acknowledge he’s a musician, “Yes, you are. You’re an amateur musician, and so am I,” this differentiation certainly doesn’t apply exclusively to musicians. For my own part, I regard beer brewing as dearly. In fact, type the name of virtually any activity into an internet search, and you’ll quickly find connections to groups of pertinent amateurs who likely would kick up dust if you told them their efforts were amateurish.
If the word love isn’t quite focused enough to separate the devotees from the dilettantes, just give any of us fervent practitioners a couple minutes to talk about our respective so-called hobbies, and we’ll likely hit on most of the same points.
Connection and Self-Identification: Some period of time after our first exposures to our beloved avocations, we serious amateurs all wake up to the fact that this thing - whatever it happens to be - is our thing. The paths our realizations take vary widely - from love at first sight to coals that smolder for decades, then explode into infernos - but we all eventually get to the same enthralled place. Correspondingly, the ages at which we become aware of our affinities play across the entire human lifespan, from dawn to dusk. But however fast or slow our infatuations develop, and no matter how old or young we are when they come to fruition, the quality of the connections is the same. We understand a particular pursuit resonates with the often ineffable elements that make us who we truly are. When asked to talk about our identities, we often describe ourselves in terms of our amateur pursuits. Our hobbies often reveal vastly more about who we are than our day jobs do. An enterprising few even take on their hobbies full-time.
Commitment and Dedication: Upon discovering the magnificent ways our chosen activities are monumentally important to us, we make commitments to pursue them. The commitments can be described variously in terms of time, money, and sacrifices of competing interests, but all the commitments are deep. Few qualifiers more definitively separate the full-time resident from the visitor than the level of commitment we make to our pursuits.
Consistency: Many wise advisers on the subject of productivity and progress say the consistency with which a person engages in a pursuit is far more important than the duration of each engagement. The devoted amateur most commonly demonstrates a pattern of frequent involvement in the object of his or her passion, and that pattern spreads over the longest available time. Consistency isn’t measured best in weeks or months, but in years: as many of them as we have at our disposal. When we’re aware and fortunate enough to discover our personally resonant avocations, we likely will pursue them day in and day out for the remainder of our lifetimes, whether they’re measured in days or decades. We devote ourselves to our pursuits because we can’t not devote ourselves to them. What’s more, we maintain consistency even when it feels less like a holiday and more like work. Consistency inevitably will involve perseverance, and the dedicated amateur perseveres.
Articulable Awareness: It’s not all fairy dust and misty mystery. Many of us can detail the precise reasons for our love of our amateur pursuits and will do so at the slightest provocation, and at considerable length, oftener than not oblivious to those many signals indicating we probably should shut up now. Our insensitivity to so-called social normality notwithstanding, our thorough knowledge of ourselves, our pursuits, and the relationships between the two, are the products of practice and experience. Our personalities have chosen our pursuits, which in turn further have sculpted our personalities. I’ve benefitted from specific realizations, about which I’m all too happy to hold forth over a pint or three, that are direct and unambiguous results of my active involvement with music and brewing. All experienced serious amateurs can do some version of the same.
Goals: A pursuit boldly changes from willy-nilly to worthy when we start setting goals. Having aspirations for progress and improvement is a sure sign we’ve been bitten by the proverbial bug. We serious amateurs froth at the mouth over the prospect of doing our respective things better next year than we did this year. A progressive, even ambitious attitude signals we have our avocations embedded fathoms below the surface. It can be challenging not to overdo it, but success in striking a productive balance between ambition and satisfaction is a hallmark of the serious amateur’s pursuits.
Accomplishments and Achievements: This is where it gets dicey. As there’s a difference between amateur and amateurish, there’s a gargantuan contrast between, A) pursuing an avocation in order to win accolades and admiration; and B) experiencing accomplishment as a natural and inevitable result of diligently pursuing the things we love. The trophies and awards may come, and if they come as products of our pure affinities, then they can chronicle a history of successful collaboration with what we love to do. However, if a person pursues an interest entirely motivated by winning awards or garnering the fawning deference of others, that pursuit is another thing altogether. If we love to do something, we do it even if no one’s watching. Over the years, whether it’s recognized by some external observer or not, we will log the memories of passing milestones, learning about our pursuits - thus about ourselves, always creating, developing, discovering, and expanding our lives. The accomplishments aren’t our goals; they are the functional byproducts of pursuing our goals successfully.
Finally, no consideration of anything ever is complete without the answer to the question, why? Why do we do choose, then pursue our amateur pursuits even though they involve popularly odious elements such as sacrifice and work? If it’s not silver and gold; if it’s not medals and titles, what do we get out of the deal? The answer requires another elaboration of the dubious term love.
We serious amateurs pursue our avocations, passions, callings, hobbies, whatever you want to call them - so long as the subject of the conversation is bona fide - because the work, efforts, and sacrifices produce that rarest of rare, most precious of precious phenomena: happiness. This happiness is the light that shines as a result of doing the things most closely aligned with our most pure selves. We amateurs are amators, and as such, we’re being purely and highly successfully ourselves. And there’s nothing amateurish about that.
