 A definition of the amateur. The amateur is young and dumb. He's innocent, he's good-hearted, he's well-intentioned. The amateur is brave, he's inventive and resourceful, he's willing to take a chance. Like Luke Skywalker, the amateur harbors noble aspirations, he has dreams, he seeks liberation and enlightenment, and he's willing, he hopes, to pay the price. The amateur is not evil or crazy, he's not deluded, he's not demented. The amateur is trying to learn. The amateur is you and me. What exactly is an amateur? How does an amateur view himself and the world? What qualities characterize the amateur? Fear is the primary color of the amateur's interior world. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of looking foolish, fear of underachieving and fear of overachieving, fear of poverty, fear of loneliness, fear of death. But mostly, what we all fear as amateurs is being excluded from the tribe, i.e. the gang, the posse, mother and father, family, nation, race, religion. The amateur fears that if he turns pro and lives out his calling, he will have to live up to who he really is and what he is truly capable of. The amateur is terrified that if the tribe should discover who he really is, he will be kicked out into the cold to die. The professional, by the way, is just as terrified as the amateur. In fact, the professional may be more terrified because she is more acutely conscious of herself and of her interior universe. The difference lies in the way the professional acts in the face of fear. The amateur identifies with his own ego. He believes he is himself. That's why he's terrified. The amateur is a narcissist. He views the world hierarchically. He continuously rates himself in relation to others, becoming self-inflated if his fortunes rise and desperately anxious if his star should fall. The amateur sees himself as the hero not only of his own movie but of the movies of others. He insists in his own mind, if nowhere else, that others share this view. The amateur competes with others and believes that he cannot rise unless a competitor falls. If he had the power, the amateur would eat the world, even knowing that to do so would mean his own extinction. Though the amateur's identity is seated in his own ego, that ego is so weak that it cannot define itself based on its own self-evaluation. The amateur allows his worth and identity to be defined by others. The amateur craves third-party validation. The amateur is tyrannized by his imagined conception of what is expected of him. He is imprisoned by what he believes he ought to think, how he ought to look, what he ought to do, and who he ought to be. Paradoxically, the amateur's self-inflation prevents him from acting. He takes himself and the consequences of his actions so seriously that he paralyzes himself. The amateur fears above all else becoming and being seen and judged as himself. Becoming himself means being different from others and thus possibly violating the expectations of the tribe without whose acceptance and approval he believes he cannot survive. By these means, the amateur remains inauthentic. He remains someone other than who he really is. The amateur has a long list of fears. Near the top are two—solitude and silence. The amateur fears solitude and silence because she needs to avoid at all costs the voice inside her head that would point her toward her calling and her destiny. So she seeks distraction. The amateur prizes shallowness and shuns depth. The culture of Twitter and Facebook is paradise for the amateur. There was a popular bumper sticker a few years ago—too much ain't enough. Too much ain't enough and too soon is too late. The amateur, the addict, and the obsessive all want what they want now. The corollary is that when they get it, it doesn't work. The restlessness doesn't abate, the pain doesn't go away, the fear comes back as soon as the buzz wears off. Because the amateur is so powerfully identified with herself, she finds it extremely difficult to view the world through the eyes of others. The amateur is often unkind or insensitive to others, but she saves her most exquisite cruelty for herself. The amateur's fear eclipses her compassion for others and for herself. In his heart, the amateur knows he's hiding. He knows he was meant for better things. He knows he has turned away from his higher nature. If the amateur had empathy for himself, he could look in the mirror and not hate what he sees. Achieving this compassion is the first powerful step toward moving from being an amateur to being a pro. The amateur believes that, before she can act, she must receive permission from some omnipotent other, a lover or spouse, a parent, a boss, a figure of authority. The amateur sits on a stool, like Lana Turner at Schwab's, waiting to be discovered. The amateur and the addict focus exclusively on the product and the payoff. Their concern is what's in it for them and how soon and how cheaply they can get it. Consumer culture is designed to exploit the amateur. If you don't believe me, watch 10 minutes of TV or scroll through any magazine or online shopping site. My beef with American culture is that almost every aspect, including the deliberations of the legislature and the judiciary, has been debased to pander to the culture of amateurism. The promise that our products and politicians proffer is the promise one might make to an infant or an addict. I will get you what you want and it will cost you nothing. Because the amateur owns nothing of spirit in the present, she either looks forward to a hopeful future or backward to an idyllic past. But the past evoked by the amateur's make-believe. It never existed. It's a highlight reel that she edited together from events that almost took place or should have occurred. In a way, the amateur's reimagined past is worse when it's true, because then it's really gone. The payoff of living in the past or the future is you never have to do your work in the present. Two Hollywood producers were talking. I've got good news, said one, and I've got bad news. Give me the good news. Remember that mansion we were trying to rent for the big party scene, but we couldn't get because it cost $50,000 for the night? Well, I just talked to the guy and he'll give it to us for $10,000. What's the bad news? He wants $100 up front. The sure sign of an amateur is that he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow. Have you ever followed a guru or a mentor? I have. I've given my power away to lovers and spouses. I've sat by the phone. I've waited for permission. I've turned in work and awaited trembling the judgment of others. I've given away my power subtly with a glance that was perceptible to no one, and I've given away overtly and shamelessly for all the world to see. Exile, failure, and banishment can be good things sometimes because they force us to act from our own center and not from someone else's. I applaud your story of how you hit bottom because at the bottom there's no one there but yourself. The force that can save the amateur is awareness, particularly self-awareness. But the amateur understands, however dimly, that if she truly achieved this knowledge, she would be compelled to act upon it. To act upon this self-awareness would mean defining herself, i.e. differentiating herself from the tribe, and thus making herself vulnerable to rejection, expulsion, and all the other fears that self-definition elicits. Fear of self-definition is what keeps an amateur an amateur and what keeps an addict an addict. The amateur dreads becoming who she really is because she fears that this new person will be judged by others as different. The tribe will declare us weird or queer or crazy. The tribe will reject us. Here's the truth, the tribe doesn't give a shit. There is no tribe. That gang or posse that we imagine is sustaining us by the bonds we share is in fact a conglomeration of individuals who are just as fucked up as we are and just as terrified. Each individual is so caught up in his own bullshit that he doesn't have two seconds to worry about yours or mine or to reject or diminish us because of it. When we truly understand that the tribe doesn't give a shit, we're free. There is no tribe and there never was. Our lives are entirely up to us.