Performance, Amateurism and Professionalism

From The Economist’s More Intelligent Life supplement comes an interesting proposal: that in the balance scale between professionalism and amateurism, professionalism has won too decisively:

How did the concept of professionalism become so dominant? And why is it assumed to be innately desirable? Professionalism has certainly travelled a long way in a short time. In the space of a hundred years, the words “professional” and “amateur” have virtually swapped places. At the end of the 19th century, an amateur meant someone who was motivated by the sheer love of doing something; professional was a rare, pejorative term for grubby money-making. Now, amateurism is a byword for sloppiness, disorganisation and ineptitude, while professionalism–as Humphrys suggested–is the default description of excellence. Ours is the age of professionalism; it is a concept in perpetual boom. But all bubbles, as we have painfully learned about finance, must eventually burst. Is it time we let some of the hot air out of professionalism?

But why amateurism? Obviously you have the love-of-the-hobby connotations, which are desirable, but it’s worth noting that amateurism isn’t necessarily possible in our day and age: amateurism was prized and valued by rich people in England. And it was a very particular type of rich person who especially valued amateurism: the landed aristocrat. The landed aristocrat—unlike the “grubby money-making” man of commerce—had time to spare, time to fill, in fact, since managing his lands was not exactly a time-intensive activity. And so—and here I don’t blame the aristocrats—they had time to fill their days with cool hobbies. You wish all people were so endowed with time and resources. It’s revealing, however, that the author is a cricketeer, maybe the most aristocratic of the English games (they make you play for six days or some such). But, it’s points like this that are worth considering:

How many others–greater talents but more acquiescent people–feared swimming against the tide and suffered longer in the straitjacket of professionalism? Take Mark Ramprakash, the great “what if” of English cricket. In the early 1990s, Ramprakash was a boy wonder–handsome, precociously gifted and destined for greatness. He was also the closest thing I ever saw to the perfect batsman–balanced, nimble, technically superb, hungry and athletic: a once-in-a-generation player. But his international career was a stop-start affair. He yo-yoed in and out of the England team, expectation morphed into disappointment, and Ramprakash’s career became marked by the frustrations of unfulfilled promise.

What happened to the intuitive talent of his early days? “When I was 18 cricket was a game. I used to go and try to hit Malcolm Marshall [perhaps the most feared of all fast bowlers] over the top. Then it became a job. Everyone’s so worried about the left elbow–is it in the right place?” The clouds of professionalism descended, and viewing what he did as a job made Ramprakash less good at doing it.

The author associates professionalism with pedantry and overfocusing on details:

I never doubted that professionalism had brought some benefits, especially in fitness and fielding. But I questioned the idea that more and more professionalism was the only solution when elite sport had already become so formulaic. It is a question of balance. If, as was often the case 50 years ago, opposing teams were unfit and under-prepared, then the professional mantra of extra planning and more training yielded a competitive advantage. But what if all the teams are training phenomenally hard and planning every minute of every game? In that context, surely the way to get ahead is to make better judgments about people and how to get the best out of them–or, more accurately, how not to mess them up.

Over-professionalism is everywhere. Teachers in England are trained to plan lessons in segments of three minutes, a theory which leaves little room for spontaneity in the classroom. They are also often exhausted before term even starts because of the endemic pressure to plan every lesson weeks in advance. It is all too tempting for teachers to sacrifice freshness–which is impossible to measure or record on paper–in favour of form-filling. But can education ever be mapped out in such prescriptive terms? Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, thinks not: “The erosion of trust in education is sucking the life out of classrooms, teachers and students. You can tick all the boxes under the sun and still be a lousy teacher. You cannot encapsulate the human experience of learning in some mechanistic pedantry.”

I think it’s an important point here: the quantification of modern life has, in many cases, proceeded into realms that statistics as yet cannot touch. Most people have the wrong attitude with numbers: they know that words can bullshit you; numbers, so definitive, seem to have pure expertise. Obviously we know this isn’t always the case. At any rate, the instinct of many—even those who know better—is to side with the numbers, the preparation, the maniacal over-focus. And as the author points out two grafs above, the dominant strategy should switch to encouraging creativity and flourishing.

But it’s important to get to exactly what we mean. Let’s take an excellent Pete Carroll profile that I reread a few days ago (for obvious reasons).

On page 4:

People who know him best invariably seize upon fun to describe Carroll, either saying it’s fun to be around him or that he’s forever having fun. His emphasis on fun comes mainly from his DNA but also from his reading, specifically W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, a 122-page book with a cult-like following. (The latest edition features a foreword by Carroll.) Using tennis as a prism through which to view all human endeavor, Gallwey says we focus too narrowly on results. “The three cornerstones of Inner Game,” he tells me, “are Performance, Learning, and Enjoyment . Usually people put Performance first, and Learning and Enjoyment are almost absent.”

If we focused more on Enjoyment and Learning, Gallwey says, we’d perform better and we’d be a lot happier: “You look at a child. He learns while he plays. Anything he tries to do, or win at, he’s playing, he has a wonderful time doing it. They’re not separate things for a child. That means to me these things are inherently built into human beings. Most human beings, you have to coach what’s already inherent—that is, the drive of excitement to learn and keep learning, and the drive to enjoy. It gets really covered up when winning is everything. I agree with Lombardi: Winning is everything. It’s just what your definition of winning is.”

Seems to be standard-issue let-them-have-fun, right? But here’s another Pete Carroll point, on practice:

“One thing I’ve learned, which I was taught a long time ago but didn’t grasp at the time, is the power of practice,” Carroll says. “The discipline that comes from practice, that allows you to transcend the early stages of learning and take you to a point where you’re freefloating and totally improvising. Through the discipline, the repetition, you become free.”

While you’re considering that quotation, consider this one two, by David Halberstam: “Being a professional is doing what you love to do on days you don’t feel like doing them.” Or, consider alternately (paraphrased): “In the beginner’s mind, there is only one possibility. In the master’s mind, there are many.”

These quotations seem to cut against each other, but I’m not sure they do. Let’s consider the Halberstam quotation first. If you juxtapose the More Intelligent Life article against the Halberstam one, you have a horrible sentiment: yes, it celebrates grit, and courage, and doing your job; on the other hand, if you have too many of these days…you will no longer love what you do anymore. And I submit that’s the death to good performance.

The Carroll and paraphrased quotations should be looked on as goals, and—in my mind, at least—resolve the professionalism vs. amateurism debate. The beginner—the child, in Galwey’s formulation—is full of possibility, but just that, possibility because the beginner lacks the tools to make possibility reality. So you practice. But practice can be boring and terrifically crushing. Worse, too, it can inculcate you and make you slaves to other people’s assumptions. They call it groupthink. That’s the danger of professionalism: because you’re doing it for a job, someone is doing the hiring, and inevitably the employee’s wishes will defer to the employer’s, consciously or not. But there’s a resolution that’s accessible to an elite. If you use practice not as a method of perfecting the tools you already have but discovering new ones, and to be relentlessly self-directed, you can look at a situation and see many possibilities rather than only a few. But I suspect that, like the amateurs of the 19th and early 20th century, that this is available only to a few: that is, those who have high enough performance that they are either self-employed or that their boss’s wishes don’t matter. But it is a way, and it’s probably more free than the old ways.