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Amateurs Quotes

Browse 14 quotes about Amateurs.

Amateurs Quotes

“It was the end of the era of the amateur, a time when everyone had to be a bit of everything. You helped your neighbors build their homes, fight their fires, raise and butcher and preserve their own food. You knew how to repair a weapon, pull a tooth, hammer a horseshoe, and deliver a child. But industrialization fostered specialization—and it was fantastic. Trained pros were better than self-taught amateurs, and their expertise allowed them to demand and develop better tools for their crafts—tools that only they knew how to operate. Over time, a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched.”

Self RelianceSpecializationIndustrializationProfessionalsAmateurs
Book:Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance
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“Those who earn their living by puppetry must satisfy the public demand, and so are to a large extent compelled to be conservative. As so often in other branches of the performing arts, it is only the amateur who can safely afford to experiment, to explore new forms and techniques, and to run the risk of failure.”

TheaterInnovationPuppetsExperimentationAmateursPuppetry
Book:Plays WIthout People: Puppetry and Serious Drama
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“When a student asked Linus Pauling how he got a good idea, the double Nobel Prize winner answered: 'You have a lot of ideas and you throw away the bad ones.' Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, said that 'theorists in biology should realize that it is ... unlikely that they will produce a good theory at their first attempt. It is amateurs who have one big bright idea beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot.”

IdeasCreativityTheoryEvolutionAmateursCrickPauling
Book:The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think
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“…as she cycled home Shelley reflected that in all her years at Birnam Wood she had never quite mastered the skill of knowing in every individual circumstance whether to overplay or underplay her expertise. It was something that Mira seemed to know instinctively—that a demonstrated competency reassured some people and aggravated others; she could pitch herself at exactly the right point between whimsical amateur and winsome entrepreneur, a performance that, when Shelley tried it, only seemed to make it much less likely that the person she was talking to would want to give her things for free.”

ConvincingExpertiseSkillEntrepreneursAmateursCompetencyOverplayingUnderplaying
Book:Birnam Wood
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