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 adventure’s the thing, of course, but it’s always nice when a self-made pioneer winds up with, say, a genius grant—something that happens all the time in our culture. We’re Americans. We love that stuff. This is our temple and our American idol.

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.

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.

But these are just the characteristics of people obsessed with a new idea, following their bliss, in love (amo, amas, amat—amateur) with one true thing.

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.

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.

One thing that marks the amateur, the best of them, is this talent for not seeing things according to the dominant paradigm.

Historically, our amateur ancestors grew out of the Ben Franklin tradition of tinkering at home. In the mid-nineteenth century, the homebrew style had to contend with a societal drive to professionalize, a movement that accelerated with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution.