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.”

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.

There is no fixed American meta-narrative, but there is this ebb and flow between Adamsian veneration of piety and Franklinian love of improvisation, between Calvinist certainty and Deist doubt, between head and heart, virtuocracy and meritocracy, good character and cunning action, between security and freedom, between professionalism and amateuris

They are either outsiders mustering at some fortress of expertise hoping to scale the walls, or pioneers improvising in a frontier where no professionals exist.

If you look at the history of professionalization of any kind, you’ll see that it tends to follow this route. In America and Europe, a great deal of professionalization occurred in the nineteenth century, when most gentlemen of breeding considered themselves amateurs at all kinds of disciplines. Go all the way back to Jefferson, who collected fossi

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.

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.

Individuals like Barron can be men or women, old or young, but chances are their gusto for their singular obsession is captivating (or irritating, depending on your mood that day).

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.