Drawar

This seems like a silly question to ask because I think we all want to be professionals in some sense. Professionals get respect and clients. However, does being a professional mean you avoid mistakes?

When you’re car is broken you go to the mechanic because you want a professional to handle things. You expect them to do the job right because they are a professional. If you engine is broken, you expect them to know the steps needed to fix it. As a mechanic, they know how they are supposed to fix it and they follow those steps. They don’t deviate from the norm because risks can’t be taken in their field. Their job is to fix the problem and move on to the next one.

If you are going to have heart surgery you want to go to a professional heart surgeon. You want to go to someone that knows what they are doing and follows the tried and true steps to fix your heart. However, there are times when a doctor has to perform a procedure never done before. Very few of these doctors exist in the world because it is dangerous to try something new on a person because failure can mean death.

However, if they try and fail does this make them any less of a professional than the doctor that sticks to only what he knows? The doctor that tries a new procedure may understand that the current way won’t work and strives to find a new technique. He isn’t less of a professional than the safe doctor, he is a doctor that is striving beyond professionalism.

Failure

Being a professional shouldn’t mean that you are afraid of failure. You should be afraid of failure due to stupidity, but never failure to try something new. When we are learning our crafts we have no problem failing because we see it as a point of learning. However, when we reach a certain level (maybe ‘professional’ in our minds), we tend to shy away from failures because they make us look bad.

Part of professionalism is knowing what works and what doesn’t. You also have to understand why something works. However, this doesn’t mean you know all possibilities of how something could work. All solutions to the problem aren’t known and they will never be known if you only stick to the common solutions.

So to answer my own question, yes we should strive for professionalism and then once we believe we have achieved it, we should strive beyond it. If you don’t believe me, then listen to Milton Glaser:

Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.