I'm a lover not a fighter
Like the Lazy Lester song popularized by the Kinks quoted in the title, I too will always much rather be a lover than a fighter. Like all jobs, even creating software can and will become tedious and unrewarding at times. Unforeseeable technical and practical obstacles hinder your progress and new technologies make you constantly work to keep up with the race to stay in sync with your peers. You really have to be motivated in this field of business to not lose heart in the midst of this chaos. Obviously, the professional in you does all this, to keep the monthly monetary rewards showing up on your account (and hopefully increasing every now and then), but what if that was your only motivation? Furthermore, is money enough of a benefit to make you constantly challenge the quality of work and ask yourself if you could still be doing better?
Amateurs = lovers
The etymology of the word "amateur" derives from the French term "lover of" and with love come all the things I personally can't get enough of in the context of software engineering: passion, personal interest and dedication. These are some of the key characteristics of a truly valuable software architect. I've been involved in software creation for some 10 years now and I simply love the way the tide has turned in those 10 years to emphasize love over knowledge and passion for learning over specialists. One of the main reasons I feel strongly about Lean thinking and Scrum is that they value the strength of a motivated non-specialist worker - or a collaborative team of such individuals - and discourage using specific specialists that lead to information silos. They encourage building teams of people who are determined and committed to sharing knowledge and collaboratively tackling any given task by any means necessary. The power of such groups is far greater than one-trick-pony gurus that waltz into a project for the sole purpose of fixing a specific issue of his expertise, only to disappear into the horizon once his task is done.Passionate amateurs > bored professionals
In his blog entry "A passionate amateur almost always beats a bored professional", Chris Anderson (editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine) elaborates the point beautifully:No matter how much you love your job, you will eventually end up doing something that feels like work--something that you have to do because your boss asked you to or because the market requires it. At that point, your professional skills may be negated by your lack of authentic interest.If you ask me, that's right on the money. The effect of your personal interest on your performance simply can't be stressed enough. Personally, I'm a conscientious objector so I can't really get into character here, but let's consider a metaphor provided by warfare anyway. If you pit an army of paid mercenaries against an army of people fighting for home and freedom, I'm willing to bet good money on the latter. No amount of training and know-how is ever going to defeat the determination and intensity provided by people defending something they love and feel passion towards. Invasive warfare is unbelievably more difficult than defensive warfare. Let your professionalism show where it should, meaning you make good on your promises, understand the realities surrounding you and bear with the tedium now and then as needed (that's why you get paid to do it), but never let it overshadow the amateur - the lover - in you for the sake of the strength and potential it provides. Create software because you want to solve problems, make bits fly and enjoy the feeling of creating something new. Be a lover, not a fighter.
