What does it look like when we take an activity we enjoy and try to turn it into our profession?
For a minute, assume that you enjoy bowling. If you just said to yourself, “I hate bowling!” Please, for the next two minutes, tell yourself, “I enjoy bowling!”
Bowling is a great way to gather family or friends in a game where most people’s skill bottoms out. The average person’s score is only a third to half of the total points available. As amateurs, the only thing to do is have fun.
Sure, you can try to bowl better, but that’s not the point of fun bowling. Bowling is about laughing at gutter balls the same way you celebrate strikes. For kids, it’s the excitement of hitting the bumpers five times and then knocking over a pin.
As an amateur, I know that the bowling ball doesn’t cooperate with me. I’m right-handed, which means that the ball should curve to the left as it approaches the pins. Instead, it takes a sharp right turn. My battle in bowling is to correct this spin.
This weird quirk would have to be stripped from my game if I was to go pro. In professional bowling, there’s no laughing at gutter balls. Gutter balls will lose you the tournament. Gutter balls could cost you $10,000. You need to be pretty close to 300 (a perfect score) to even have a chance at the money.
You’ll need to spend hours getting your spin just right and then perfect the motion with continuous repetition. No one will enjoy being around you while you’re practicing bowling. The small joys disappear. It’s no longer fun to watch kids hit the bumper six times. Now all you care about is if you bowl the strike or mercifully pick up the spare.
Some people may enjoy this type of bowling, but amateurs certainly won’t.
Side note: if you were pretending to like bowling, you may now stop.
The joy of amateurism may dissolve on the professional level. As an amateur writer, you might enjoy being able to daydream about your work. As a professional writer, you need to commit to putting words on the paper, editing them and then sending the piece to a languishing newsletter audience.
While designing rollercoasters may sound fun, you’ll soon find that most of that job is going to meetings and testing safety measures. If that process isn’t for you, find an online game where you design rollercoasters.
If you’re a mini golfer, you better enjoy the simple act of getting a hole-in-one on a plain-looking course because that’s all that matters. These “professional” courses don’t have windmills or volcanoes. The world of professional minigolf is all business (with microtransactions given its name)—also, only the hole-in-one counts. You pick up your ball when you miss.
The things that make the amateur activities fun often shift when you talk about professional ones. Make sure you like what professional life looks like before heading down that lane because, as a professional, you have to always apply the perfect spin to bowl strikes.