I do not like this analysis.<p>"A professional always does everything necessary to complete a job. An amateur sometimes chooses only the fun parts."<p>My problem is, what is "a job"?<p>Most people work on a team in order to work on "the fun parts" and let someone else deal with the other parts. I'm lousy at marketing and sales. I cannot do graphical design. Don't trust me at all to handle the bookkeeping.<p>Those are all parts of of the job of releasing a software product. But I only find the programming-related parts to be fun.<p>That's why I'm a professional programmer, but not a professional in the other fields.<p>I also don't like this:<p>"An amateur golfer, for example, may thrill at the crack of hitting a 300-yard drive but hate putting. And so that amateur may frequently choose to pick up the ball once it's “close enough” to the hole."<p>Golfing has amateur championships. When Tiger Woods competed in the United States Amateur Championship in the mid-1990s, he did not "choose to pick up the ball". He did all of the parts, and did them well.<p>The USGAs rules about amateur status include things like a limit of $750 max prize money for the tournament. <a href="http://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/rules-hub/amateur-status.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/rules-hub/amateur...</a> It's "amateur" because the golfers aren't making a living from golfing.