How to Become an Amateur
Imagine that the world has always belonged to the experts, those who knew a great deal about one thing and were recognized for it. Each in their own little box, with their title, their training, their specialty.
The world is changing fast. Yes, I know you’ve heard that a thousand times. But between artificial intelligence, quantum computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and so many other new things, it’s becoming clear that, however much we know, there’s a whole world we still don’t know. In a way, we’re all becoming amateurs again, and I keep wondering what changes when what we know stops being the only door into another person.
The word amateur comes from the Latin amator, “the one who loves,” “who is fond of.” I notice that many brilliant people preserved that amateur spirit, because the formality of professionalism can squeeze out curiosity and the freedom to get things wrong.
Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet and one of the greatest names in the Portuguese language, made his living as a commercial correspondent, translating letters for firms, and kept his writing as a refuge of total freedom, where dozens of heteronyms fit, the voices and personalities he created in order to write, and no publishing market to please.
Franz Kafka, the Czech writer who wrote in German and one of the most striking authors of twentieth-century literature, worked at a workers’ accident insurance company and wrote at night, in his spare hours, and saw writing as something so intimate that he asked for his manuscripts to be burned after his death. Both had a trade that paid the bills and another life, a deeper one, that no one had to approve.
A few years ago, an old mentor asked me a question I’ve never forgotten. “If you took off the expert hat for a fraction of a second and put on the amateur hat, revealing your passion, your heart, where would that take you?”
We were on Zoom. I had the tireless look of someone who clearly hasn’t arrived where she wanted to go, but with all the grit and energy for it and about as clear as a mole on where to begin.
I decided to try it.
I left the route completely. I took classes in theater, hypnosis, reiki, mindfulness and, now, philosophy. I went completely off the rails! At least that’s what I imagine some people thought. And that’s fine. It reawakened my heart. There was a side of me that had fallen asleep and was missing terribly, because the professional world pulled so hard on my rational side that I had been limping.
That other side brought an even greater need to connect with others from the heart. To feel, feel and feel. Oh, how awful. The sensation was of drowning, because when we’re very rational, with a lot of air element in our lives, a lot of thoughts, we raise a dam so the water can’t get in, and the breaking of that dam was like a great flood. Then the waters calmed, and what I could not see or feel before began to appear.
And something started to circulate again.
I spent years hiding what I felt, and I’ve been learning to feel again. In this area of emotions I’m an amateur, and that’s why the question of vitality fascinates me so much. Vitality, for me, is feeling alive in life. Huh? Yes! There are many people we know who have simply forgotten to lie down. No pulse, no life running through their veins, the living dead, and there’s a dazzling mechanicalness in that. God forbid I stay that way, although I bet we have all been there once in our lives, or else we haven’t lived enough yet.
I’ve been studying vitality and noticing that not only our body has vitality, but also our lifestyle, our career, the companies we work for and everything that has life and is part of a system, of an ecosystem. I think that to free our amateur spirit we need to find what makes us alive again, something deeper than euphoria, excitement or even enthusiasm. I’m talking about Will, the kind that seems divine, or is, who knows. Vitality is what we feel when it’s lit.
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We can notice this in a conversation. There’s a moment when a person stops reciting their title and starts talking about something they love, and the voice changes, the body leans forward and the eyes have someone in them again. Sparkle! Almost always it’s in that instant that they call themselves an amateur, a little embarrassed, apologizing for not being a specialist, when in truth they are in what mindfulness calls beginner’s mind, that of someone who looks at something as if for the first time, full of curiosity and with no obligation to have all the answers, and that’s where Will lives.
It’s this same Will that makes someone magnetic, because we hardly ever look away from someone whose vitality is lit, alive in what they do.
After all, when did we become so concerned with knowing, getting it right and showing competence that we forgot the pleasure of simply discovering? I think we have spent too much time believing that we only deserve to speak about what we are expert in, and so we keep what moves us most in a drawer, safe from judgment and safe from life.
This comes from a very corporate model, in which I hire you for your expertise and that’s how we relate. But is that how we humans connect? Or is it that what we love draws attention first, and only then do we want to understand the expertise of someone who was so alive speaking about it?
I lived this in Kuwait, almost by accident. I stumbled into that story, listening to my heart and helping women recognize themselves better, and deep down I was also in the process, recognizing myself alongside them. There was no plan and no strategy, only the Will to be there.
And so people started to get curious. They wanted to know what I did, they went looking, they found out I worked in marketing and, from there, many clients came. I love helping people, and I love my work in marketing, helping businesses grow, and without my planning it one thing kept opening the door to the other. It wasn’t because I had thought up a new way to sell my services. It was when I stopped thinking professionally about everything that other possibilities appeared.
How many times have we been enchanted listening to someone talk about something they love, even without understanding anything about the subject?
That’s why amateurism can be the showcase that connects. It shows who we are, what moves us and the desire behind what we do, and that awakens the curiosity to understand what our expertise is.
Ah! But, Fabi, I love what I do, and I really am an expert at it. I study every day, I like talking about it, and it lights me up when I work. That’s wonderful, and that’s exactly where we want everyone to arrive. But even in what we already know and have mastered, we can keep being amateurs, looking at our own craft as if for the first time and asking what we haven’t seen yet. So tell me, what else has been waking you up lately?
We don’t need to give up what we know or throw away our years of experience. We can be excellent at one thing and complete beginners at fifty others.
The experts of the past were introduced by their box, their title, their training, their specialty. Now that so much puts us back in the position of learners, we can introduce ourselves from what we love, and people discover our expertise afterward, as a consequence of a connection that already exists.
So I leave one question for us. What would we try if we started with what we love, with no obligation to get it right?
Fabiana Santana writes VITAL, a newsletter about desire, vitality and the invisible forces that sustain or drain people, organizations and brands.
A brand strategist, consultant and speaker, she has accumulated more than two decades of international experience leading processes of transformation, growth and revitalization of businesses in Brazil and the Middle East.
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