”Professional”.

 

Professional 

I’ve been thinking about this lately. I recently got out from active field work. Now I’m no English teacher as you can probably see from my previous texts… but I have thought a lot about the word ”professional”. According to Oxford dictionary, professional means (adjective)

1. relating to or belonging to a profession.
   
2. engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
   

or (noun)

3. a person engaged or qualified in a profession.
4. a person engaged in a specified activity, especially a sport, as a main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
   

This really is not important per se. Everyone does things at their own level, be it ”professional” or a hobby. But things might not be so black and white as they seem. A little background story.

When I was working in my former team we had a chance to attend our … let’s call it ”sister” organizations exercise. These people could only be called professional in category 3, since they are were not paid or do their stuff as their ”main occupation rather than as a pastime”. Now before anyone thinks I am about to start bad mouthing them because they are not professionals… it was quite the contrary. They did their basics so out of routine that I actually shamed us instead. They were taking things way more serious than we did. And they did a very nice job. They had the enthusiasm and motivation in order. Doing things at a lower level but doing it better. 

So how is this even possible? Does this mean that we were amateurs? After all, we were the ones who were getting paid and they were not.

I don’t mean that the definitions are wrong. But it does get tricky if you only watch the ”getting paid” -part. 

I would say that in sports world the definitions are more clear: if you are not good you won’t get paid doing it (or your competitors just really suck which I doubt rarely happens). But in working environment it’s not so clear cut.

Then what about ”done it for real”? Even that does not solve anything since you could have done things in real life without ever been a professional. 

I am just questioning the status of both the professional and amateur. A professional might be there just for getting paid and an amateur might be in to that stuff and be superior to that professional.