Monday, December 01, 1986
All You Need is Love
In 1986 and 1987, the SWET Newsletter published a series of essays on the subject of professionalism. Five of these were later collected in Wordcraft (1990). Fred Uleman contributed this one.
It is often said that the amateur is someone who does it for love and the professional someone who does it for money. As a result, the best of the amateurs may be better than the worst of the professionals. In effect, the amateur may be doing a professional job and the professional an amateurish job.
Yet, if this inversion can be true, the paid/unpaid distinction is obviously invalid as the sole delineation between the professional and the amateur. At the same time, while amateurs might refuse to take money for their work, professionals have been known to do things for free.
Perhaps even more importantly, the love/money distinction is invalid because of its covert inference that professionals do not enjoy their work—that they do it for the money. Any professional who is any good has to love his work, for the simple reason that it is impossible to sustain sufficient interest to get good at something if you do not enjoy at least some aspects of it. Monetary rewards may keep someone at a job, but they cannot generate excellence.
In reality, then, we might better distinguish not between professionals and amateurs, but among amateurs, mercenaries, and professionals: the amateur doing it solely for love; the mercenary solely for money; and the professional for love and money.
The real professional is thus never "off the job." Even away from work, he is constantly alert to work-related information and ideas. This does not mean that he has abandoned his private life. Rather, it means he has integrated his professional life into his private life, or vice versa, and that he is never far from either.
As a professional, he is doing work he enjoys, and this enjoyment is one of the reasons he is good at it. Work is not something that has to be done. It is something he takes a personal pride in being ale to do and do well. The fact that you get paid for it—that it is "work"—does not mean you are not allowed to enjoy it.
What are the implications of this love of work? First, it means you are proud of what you do—not simply, or even necessarily, of the occupation per se, but rather of the specific work that you specifically do. Because it is your work, you take the trouble to do it right.
You're also proud to get paid for your work, not for the money itself but for the recognition it implies and the fact that other people also value your work. Money is, after all, only one measure of worth, and not a very good measure, at that.
Because you are proud of your work, you take the trouble to build in quality, even what might be called excessive quality. (Excessive quality is quality in excess of the market requirements. A translation that reads as though it had been written in the target language has excessive quality when it is intended only to give the reader a rough outline of what the writer is saying —yet today's excesses are often tomorrow's norms, and the company that is unable to keep up with increasing market sophistication is soon left behind.) Professionals are standard-setters.
You do the best you can on a given job. True, there are inevitably trade-offs as you weigh the amount of time and effort it will take, but you do not deliberately do a shoddy job. Excessive quality is not cost-efficient, but you take sufficient pride in your work that the customer gets more rather than less than he pays for. Trade-offs are no excuse for rip-offs. If the rewards are not sufficient to let you do the job right, you turn it down.
You also take sufficient pride in your work that you do not do things you are not good at. If you have no medical background, you do not pretend you can do medical translations. Being able to fake it is not a mark of professionalism, for the simple reason that faking it is not professional.
Much more could be written about the professional attitude, but it begins to sound preachy and pompous after a while—mainly because we all know we should take more professional pride in our work and strive harder to give it the tender, loving care it deserves. We all know what professionalism is. We just have trouble doing it sometimes.
From Newsletter No. 29 (December 1986)
Reprinted in Wordcraft, 1990.