Profess What You Do

Be professional by being you. 

Professional expectations are over-rated.

A case for ‘Professions’ to mean simply professing what we practice –

 

Volume of work can dictate labels, regardless of haters. Reputation as ‘good or bad’ can be more nebulous as tastes vary widely, compared to the proof of the pudding as being a produced edible product which is at least quite adequate compared to what most people could make. 

 

“He made thousands of shoes, so he was undeniably a shoemaker.” 

“Perhaps but he died penniless, so he was a failed shoemaker.” 

“But he was successful at making shoes, selling them is another matter.”

 

No matter how bad we are at things, certainly many worse things were sold by others of lesser quality, so price cannot be the gauge of a life. Quality does not determine profession if it is what we are professed to do, nor should it if we are allowed a niche market within our means. Professional qualities matter, no doubt, but luck plays a much bigger role than we think, in whether our talents are practiced or realized. Being ‘well-rounded’ does not mean always excelling at everything, it can and should more often mean being well adjusted on average, as in mathematics an ‘average’ is a reasonable means between to unreasonable extremes. 

 

Professional qualities when they exist are not over-rated, but our acceptance of needing to use that term only for good qualities which may be superficial is at least questionable. Professional qualities can mask unethical long term qualities, such as when rich company owners make all the profits while workers are forced on unemployment or worse. Be all you can be, be professional because it is what you do, as well as how you do it. If people do not like you because you were not your best, or not good enough according to them; it is not always the product, it is often the market. Markets are not gods. Customers are not always correct, often they are jerks because people are fickle and change their minds. Trades are about relations, and when they are good exchanges are about equality.

I am not a writer or artist for competition of label, i express myself because i cannot bear being away from imagination for too long. Competition of label is what it is, superficial. Labels are titles we apply to surfaces, for the purposes of artificial classification. ‘Identification’ itself runs much deeper than surface symbols.

 

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