Amateur — why being a beginner isn't an insult (Word at Work Series)

Good ideas often start with a single word. This is here's an idea worth playing with with myself, Rob Lambert, from Cultivated. Each episode, one word, its origin, its journey, and what it still means for the way we work today. Good morning. This week's word at work is the word amateur.

So I got called amateur the other week and the person using that word was obviously trying to cast an insult. But you know what? To be honest, I was rather remarkably pleased. You see, the word amateur isn't an insult. Not really.

So let's take a look at the dictionary definition before we explore a little bit of history. We'll bring it to life with a wonderful street photography book. There is a connection, I promise, before we have a quick look for what this might mean for the world of work. So let's firstly look at the dictionary definition of which we might find that it is actually an insult or certainly derogatory of some perspective. So amateur in the dictionary says a person who takes part in a sport or other activity without being paid.

And then the second one is a person who is not skilled at the activity. It can be used in examples such as the crew or amateurs or a bunch of amateurs which means incompetent, bunglers, people who aren't very good at what they do. But let's put that dictionary definition to side. Amateur, the history of the word comes from the Latin word amorta which means lover. Things are getting a bit spicy here on cultivated.

So it arrived into English with the French, and it basically means somebody who does something simply for the love of it. No payment, no audience, no career plan, just the thing it is itself and that human pull towards doing it, doing it for the love of it. So what I'm holding here in my hand is one of my favorite street photography books. It's a book about the photographer Vivian Meyer. It's a wonderful book full of some of the most amazing street photography, but here's what's particularly interesting about Vivian's story.

You see, Vivian was a nanny. She worked in Chicago in the middle of the twentieth century. She was also by any serious measure a phenomenal street photographer. Some people have said she's one of the best of the twentieth century, and in her lifetime, she shot over 150,000 photos, but less than about 5% were actually developed, actually turned from the negative into a printed photograph. So when she died in 2009, her archive, all those undeveloped films, those roles, those prints, those negatives, well, they were all sitting in a storage unit that went to auction over unpaid bills.

A collector named John Malouf bought these boxes of negatives without really knowing what he was buying, and that's when the world found out what Vivian Mayer had been doing for fifty years. She was an amateur in the truest sense of that word. She was doing this for the love of it, and that love of photography produced a body of work that is hanging in galleries. It's filling books and it was even part of an Academy Award nominated documentary. You see we use the word amateur differently at work.

We use the word amateur to dismiss people who are still learning, who are still on that journey, who are still discovering what it is that they're good at, and we often use it as a dismissive for people who maybe aren't very good at what it is they are doing. It's an insult usually. It's as though they're not yet knowing fully what it is that they're doing is the problem rather than it just being a point on a journey or a beginning of a fruitful new learning path or career, but every single expert was an amateur at some point. So it's not whether they're at the beginning of this journey, often it's a case of whether they love it enough to stay with it. Vivian Mayer loved it enough to shoot a 150,000 photographs with never the expectation that anybody might ever see them.

You see, think an amateur is not a bad thing. It is not a lack of professionalism. It is the love for what you do, and in some respects, that's what professionalism, our world of work is trying to get back to. It's trying to rekindle, trying to find, trying to secure the love in the work that we do. I look forward to speaking to you in next week's Word at Work.