Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character

Business scholars have attempted to deconstruct how such amateurs succeed and one noted theory, published in the Harvard Business Review, argues that outsiders are not burdened with the “curse of knowledge.”

The amateur breaking out and getting recognized—that is our secular God.

Once you start looking for it, the only real shocker is how ubiquitous a figure the aspiring amateur is in America and yet how seemingly invisible these people are in our journalistic media.

Dropping out is a great American tradition, the very essence of amateurism, another recapitulation of the pioneer/immigrant narrative, the ultimate in starting fresh: no school!

So we think amateurs are hopeless dreamers, made practically adorable by their obsessive love for some one true thing, and each and every one of them charged with the potential of being a genius and making a crucial discovery.

The cyclical return to the garage is happening now, as Americans sense that some great turn in history has come. It’s time to tear down the fortresses and build them again, which is always traumatic.

This powerful emotion usually indicates someone’s embrace of a notion (invention, theory, way of life) as a compulsive passion for the thing—not the money, fame, or career that could come of it.

They are either outsiders mustering at some fortress of expertise hoping to scale the walls, or pioneers improvising in a frontier where no professionals exist.

A 2006 Harvard Business Review article detailed the Curse of Knowledge, reporting that many breakthroughs are achieved by people who don’t know the jargon and minutiae of a field, who work outside the realm of day-to-day expertise. Lacking that detailed scaffolding of understanding, they can often see things that insiders look right past.