“Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.
[…]
The poet, the artist, the sleuth—whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely “well adjusted,” he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are.
[…]
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly and unaware. The “expert” is the man who stays put.”