masters, amateurs and hacks
commending people on effort rather than outcome, is a healthier way to help them grow — a learning in parenting I’ve recently come to understand. Growing up, I was more applauded for outcomes — called intelligent or talented upon achieving something. This has turned me into something of a hack, because how I achieved a thing seemed to matter less than what I achieved. A lot of my motivation is still about seeking external validation for an inherent quality in 'me'. I'm slowly figuring out how to separate the self from the deed, the adjectives from the adverbs. But I suspect there’s too many misplaced incentives for us to ever truly know if we’re doing something for the sake of it or to be seen by others.
Nothing moral about one over another, but knowing this reduces the value of recognition and external validation for me. A unidirectional sense of good contradicts the plural nature of creative intelligence. It can be argued that awards based on numbers could be considered fair, but what we measure and how we define excellence should not converge to a singularity, especially in the arts. More so, if we do follow 'standards of good', they're bound to be rooted in colonial, classist or casteist narratives.
In an age where 'monoculture' is dead, is there any meaning in recognising a book, film, or dish for 'moving the needle forward in the cultural landscape or discourse'? Is there even a forward in a world of cyclic trends where we experience everything everywhere all at once?
In a way, the dispersion of audiences, and consequent demographic bubbles has made it possible for a diversity of excellence to find its own specific audiences. The pie seems expandable as we're beginning to recognise the inhumane expectations of aspiring toward a single definition of best. The design of capitalism has long demanded that we master a thing, compete to outperform the other, until each of us is pigeon-holed into performing a singular task with absolute precision — toward 'progress'. It's why doing something for the sake of it is so hard to pursue, or commend.
The word amateur has its roots in the Italian word amare, or 'to love' — to do something for the love of it. It's quite different from the etymology for passion — which has its roots in suffering. Or maybe, they're similar in that we have a masochistic desire to suffer for love. Either way, I find it an under-rated pursuit — obstinately remaining an amateur/ actively refusing to master a craft for capital gains/ doing something for no commercial gain/ not performing productivity or pursuing perfection.
To me it speaks to the ability to appreciate effort over outcome. To remove the self from the activity, separate the act from the praise, the verb from the noun. To value the act of loving, over being the object of affection?