Hi, my name is Stephan, and I’m an amateur.

No, I’m not having yet another existential quarter-life crisis. I’m actually doing better than ever, creatively speaking. And here’s why.

For well over three years (!), this newsletter was called Thoughtful Thursday. There are several reasons I baptized my literary baby like this. First, I wanted the name to sound smart (duh). Second, I wanted it to be an alliteration (ostensibly, a modern writer’s favorite stylistic device). But, of course, these two reasons were hardly sufficient to justify such a cringe-worthy name.

It was the third reason that got me.

The third reason was that I had once read that any good newsletter needs a strict and consistent schedule. I even found a study claiming that newsletters sent out on one specific weekday (i.e., Thursdays) have the highest chance of being opened by readers.

Voila. Thoughtful Thursday was born, baptized, and blasted into the orbit of the World Wide Web.

Sure enough, the name manifested into a strategy that bore fruit for some time. I kept a consistent streak and religiously fulfilled my self-inflicted deadlines, even if that meant sitting down on a Thursday night at 11 pm and sucking the last drops of creative juice out of my brain cells.

But then, two years down the road, the fruits turned foul. Quite often, I would have a thrilling idea but forbade myself to flesh it out until Thursday. I can’t explain why, but it just needed to be Thursday. Conversely, I would feel guilty if it was, in fact, Thursday, but I didn’t have anything to say. Around that time, my holy Thursdays also started getting crowded with university lectures and therapy appointments. But still, I clung to the idea that my newsletter needed to be sent out on Thursdays. It just needed to be Thursday.

Then, one day, I had a thought. “What if I stopped being thoughtful on Thursdays? What if, instead, I sent out my newsletters whenever I like?”

It may sound trivial. But when, like me, you’re an insecure creative who named his newsletter after a weekday and smacked a pretentious adjective on top of it without delivering on those words — well, breaking free from those chains feels liberating.

(In fact, these thoughts made me generally doubt the hype around consistency and building good habits. I expanded on this idea in a recent article. You can read it here.)

All of this is to say that this newsletter is getting a rebrand. It’s now called The Amateur. What I love about this word is that it’s jam-packed with paradoxical meanings. Today, “amateur” is often used in a negative, condescending way. Particularly in the creative world, many guidebooks seem to use the word as a substitute for “laughable loser who should stop trying.” For example, here are just a few of many statements about amateurs from Steven Pressfield’s book Turning Pro:

• “What ails us is that we are living our lives as amateurs.”
• “The amateur tweets. The pro works.”
• “The amateur is an egotist.”

And my favorite:

• “The amateur lacks compassion for himself.”

Now, I find this holy crusade against amateurs impressive. Even so, I beg to differ. In reality, the word “amateur” stems from the Latin amator, which means “lover.” So, actually, amateurs love their craft more than professionals. They execute their tasks not flawlessly but effortlessly, not obsessively but vibrantly.

In line with my recent endeavors to half-ass more things, I want to abandon the “professional” mindset and return to being a bloody amateur. Ultimately, when it comes to these things, I side with the words of Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki:

I’ll expand on the idea of becoming an amateur in the next newsletter(s). Which, in the style of a true amateur, I’ll send out somewhere between tomorrow and the very distant future.

But definitely not on Thursdays. Amateurs hate Thursdays.