Professionals are everywhere. Today, little happens without the participation of a professional "expert" offering his specialized knowledge: scaling and estimating, measuring and consulting, planning and organizing the lives of millions of people around the world. In his book, Andy Merifield (b. 1960) contrasts the professional expert with an alternative image - the amateur , a person who thinks outside the box, takes risks, dreams of the impossible, strives for independence - and thereby changes the world. Using the example of such personalities as Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Guy Debord, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs, Merifield shows how you can quit a challenge to pedants, accountants and formalists, and begin to enjoy what we do again.