We Don’t Live Long Enough to Be Anything Else
Austin Kleon says to be an amateur. He’s right. Here’s why that’s not the insult you think it is.
I’ve been reading Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work again. There’s a chapter title that keeps stopping me every time I encounter it. Just three words:
Be an Amateur.
The first time I read it, I did the thing you probably do too: registered it, sort of agreed in the abstract, moved on.
The second time — this week, walking and recording a voice memo about it because that’s apparently what I do now — it landed differently.
We don’t live long enough to be anything else.
That’s the Kleon quote. And I’ve been sitting with it for days because I think it’s one of the most quietly radical things you can say to anyone who’s trying to build a creative life.
We have completely inverted what “amateur” means, and this inversion is costing us enormously.
Historically, the word comes from the Latin amare — to love. An amateur was someone who did something for love, as opposed to pay. The romantic poets were amateurs. Darwin was an amateur. The entire tradition of the gentleman naturalist, the Sunday painter, the devoted musician who also happened to be a doctor — these were amateurs. And their work is a substantial part of the cultural inheritance of the species.
At some point, we started using the word pejoratively. Amateur became code for not serious, not skilled, not professional. The kind of work that doesn’t count. The kind of person who produces it: embarrassing, trying too hard, lacking self-awareness about their limitations.
This is a disaster. Because what it’s done is poison the well for everyone who isn’t already an acknowledged expert, which is to say almost everyone.
Here’s the thing about creative development: it requires a long period of being worse at something than you wish you were.
There is no shortcut. There is no way to get from “beginner” to “person with genuine capability” without going through a substantial middle stretch where you’re neither one thing nor the other. Where the work you’re producing doesn’t match the taste you’ve developed. Where the gap between vision and execution is large and visible and occasionally humiliating.
If you’re carrying shame about this period — if “I’m just an amateur” is something you say apologetically, with a slight wince, as a pre-emptive defence against being taken seriously — then you are making an already difficult period actively worse. You’re adding a layer of identity-shame on top of an already challenging skill-development process.
Whereas if you can hold “amateur” as an accurate and honourable description — I do this for love, I’m still developing, the work shows where I am not where I wish I was — then the whole thing becomes more workable. Less fraught. More enjoyable, actually.
There’s also a we don’t live long enough dimension that I want to address directly, because I think this is where the quote really cuts.
Most of the things worth doing take longer to develop than most people expect. Not decades — often just a few consistent years, which sounds manageable until you actually think about how we spend our time. The craft you want to develop. The skill you want to have. The creative practice that would make your life feel fuller.
You can keep waiting until you feel ready, or qualified, or authorised to start. You can keep doing the research pass without doing the production pass. You can keep planning the course rather than starting to teach, keep filling sketchbooks that nobody sees, keep developing the voice memo archive without doing anything with it.
Or you can start now, as an amateur, with what you have, at the level you’re actually at — and let the development happen in public, imperfectly, in real time.
We genuinely don’t have infinite time. The average creative practice that starts at 40 has maybe 30-40 productive years in it if you’re lucky and healthy. That sounds like a lot. It’s not. Not if you spend the first ten waiting to be good enough to start.
I’ve been teaching long enough to see the two main categories of creative students.
The first group arrives with apologetic self-descriptions. “I’m not really an artist.” “I know I’m terrible at this.” “I just want to have a go, I don’t expect to be any good.” They’re pre-empting the disappointment they’ve trained themselves to expect. They’ve learned that creative work is something other, more talented people do, and they’re asking permission to exist in that space.
The second group arrives curious. They don’t know if they’ll be good at this, but they’re genuinely interested to find out. They’re not apologising for being beginners — they’re just beginning. The amateur status doesn’t shame them because they haven’t accepted the inversion that made “amateur” mean “lesser.”
Guess which group makes more progress, and does so with more enjoyment.
I want to reclaim the word. Not ironically. Genuinely.
I am, in several of the things I’m working on right now, an amateur. Building online business infrastructure for the first time. Developing an audience I’ve never had before. Writing for publication rather than just for my own archive. Learning the tools and the strategies and the rhythms of a publishing practice.
I’m doing it for love. I’m learning as I go. I’m not embarrassed about that.
We don’t live long enough to wait until we’re ready.
Start. Do it as an amateur. Let the love carry you through the part where you’re not yet good.
That’s the whole thing.
What would you start tomorrow if “I’m just an amateur” wasn’t a reason to wait? Not a reason to lower your standards — just a reason to begin at the level you’re actually at, rather than the level you think you should be at. Name the thing. Put a date on it.
CP52 Stage: Stage 2 — The Decision (committing to the creative path)
Series: What I Didn’t Know I Knew
Image note: A well-loved sketchbook, imperfect pages visible. The beauty of work in progress, not work perfected.
