he’s always looking at birds he’s seen a thousand times as if he’s seeing them for the first time. That’s a skill born of love, amateurism in the best sense. It’s an obsession, the kind that makes you drift off into the woods in college, so consumed with the unutterable pleasure of the work that you forget, ultimately, about earning a degree.

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.”

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.

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

He was not just a pioneer (trying to improvise his way into the hearts and wallets of the French), but our meta-pioneer. He created this image of us as clean-living bumpkins but also as the pioneering amateurs we often are, fiddling our way into becoming something new by pretending to be something we’re not.

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.

Like any invasive species, amateurs gather where there has been some kind of stress to the system, some kind of disturbance. When they clump together by forming a group of websites or a weekend club, it reveals something about where the inventive surges in a culture are located.

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!