Paul Graham on Amateurs (Excerpt)

You might have guessed, but I've recently finished reading much of Paul Graham's archives, and have been trying to determine which parts I felt are best to excerpt here on the site.

I figure this is a valuable time-saving exercise for you, a chance to me to engage with the material I liked, and a way to highlight the best of what is available on Paul's website. (Note: all bold text is my only edit).

If you are fortunate enough to be able to read this article in a calm, quiet place, I think you will find that virtually every paragraph will trigger a rumination on how this applies to your life. (Especially if you are a frequent blog reader/writer. I particularly like the idea that the word "work" has its origins in the word for "torture".)

The excerpt below contains both an inspiring message about why you should follow your interests, as well as some critical commentary on how to think about writing for the web. 

Writing this good - in terms of quality, clarity and insight - is rare to come across, and I hope you enjoy. - Ed

Paul Graham on Amateurs
(Excerpt from "What Business Can Learn from Open Source")

I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like.  Well, that's news to no one.  So how can I claim business has to learn it?  When I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it.

Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler.  It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture.

This turns out not to be the last word on work, however. As societies get richer, they learn something about work that's a lot like what they learn about diet.  We know now that the healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to eat because they were poor.  Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it.  I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't.

There's a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs. The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology, though it's staring us in the face.  "Amateur" was originally rather a complimentary word.  But the thing to be in the twentieth century was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not.

That's why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money.   Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to hack the source.  They switch because it's a better browser.

It's not that Microsoft isn't trying.  They know controlling the browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly.  The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free.

I suspect professionalism was always overrated -- not just in the literal sense of working for money, but also connotations like formality and detachment.  Inconceivable as it would have seemed in, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.

One of the most powerful of those was the existence of "channels." Revealingly, the same term was used for both products and information: there were distribution channels, and TV and radio channels.

It was the narrowness of such channels that made professionals seem so superior to amateurs.  There were only a few jobs as professional journalists, for example, so competition ensured the average journalist was fairly good.  Whereas anyone can express opinions about current events in a bar.  And so the average person expressing his opinions in a bar sounds like an idiot compared to a journalist writing about the subject.

On the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower. You don't have to buy a drink, and they even let kids in. Millions of people are publishing online, and the average level of what they're writing, as you might expect, is not very good.  This has led some in the media to conclude that blogs don't present much of a threat-- that blogs are just a fad.

Actually, the fad is the word "blog,"  at least the way the print media now use it.  What they mean by "blogger" is not someone who publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online. That's going to become a problem as the Web becomes the default medium for publication.  So I'd like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes online. How about "writer?"

Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want.  So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against.  They're competing against the best writing online.  And, like Microsoft, they're losing.

I know that from my own experience as a reader.  Though most print publications are online, I probably read two or three articles on individual people's sites for every one I read on the site of a newspaper or magazine.

And when I read, say, New York Times stories, I never reach them through the Times front page.   Most I find through aggregators like Google News or Slashdot or Delicious. Aggregators show how much better you can do than the channel.  The New York Times front page is a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting.  And it's only now that you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is.

Most articles in the print media are boring.  For example, the president notices that a majority of voters now think invading Iraq was a mistake, so he makes an address to the nation to drum up support. Where is the man bites dog in that?  I didn't hear the speech, but I could probably tell you exactly what he said.  A speech like that is, in the most literal sense, not news: there is nothing new in it.

Nor is there anything new, except the names and places, in most "news" about things going wrong.  A child is abducted; there's a tornado; a ferry sinks; someone gets bitten by a shark; a small plane crashes.  And what do you learn about the world from these stories? Absolutely nothing.  They're outlying data points; what makes them gripping also makes them irrelevant.

As in software, when professionals produce such crap, it's not surprising if amateurs can do better.  Live by the channel, die by the channel: if you depend on an oligopoly, you sink into bad habits that are hard to overcome when you suddenly get competition.