A while back I learned of a poet and historian named Peter Viereck (1916-2006), who not only won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1949 but also wrote insightful books of social and literary criticism in the American individualist tradition of Emerson, Thoreau, and Randolph Bourne. In his now-forgotten book The Unadjusted Man, published in 1956, Viereck celebrated the kind of person who dodges the pressures of conformity (what he called "overadjustment") to maintain a measure of intellectual independence. Here is a fine passage about one path to becoming an "unadjusted man":
To remain an individual in an overadjusted society, start out, first of all, by being an amateur at everything, never a professional. This is true whether you are a poet, scholar, or political leader, whether you are an artist of life, love, or billiards. According to Mark Twain, to play billiards moderately well is the sign of a gentleman; to play it too well is the sign of a mis-spent life. In an age of boorish, narrow specialists and of efficient experts who do everything "too well" in unimaginative, slavish stereotypes, in such an age only the amateur stays inwardly free. An amateurish life is a life of harmonious proportion because it alone finds time to cultivate the complete human being, public and private, cerebral and emotional. A free society requires not only free ideals, free institutions, but free personalities. The free personality is an "amateur" in both senses: (1) he who does things for love, not utility; (2) the non-technician, not yet deprived of creative imagination by expertise.
Although Viereck paints with too broad a brush - to take but one example, pianist Glenn Gould was both a consummate professional and a consummate individualist - his central point about being "inwardly free" is worthy of serious consideration. At root this is a matter not necessarily of professional status but of attitude. I'll grant that the attitude - similar, perhaps, to the "beginner's mind" that Buddhists try to manifest - might be easier to keep if one doesn't feel a need to achieve the status, yet it does seem like something that even non-amateurs could cultivate...
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION