In the context of the quark model of hadrons, the spin and the magnetic moment of the proton cannot be taken to be proportional. This is in contradiction with the widely used relation between these two properties of the proton. This apparent difficulty is addressed by the most elementary notions of the relevant physics. In particular it is emphasized that the widely used relation is only valid in the lowest orders of perturbation, in which transitions between different baryons do not occur. For other processes where such transitions do occur, such as inelastic scattering off the protons, the quark model relation for the magnetic moment is used to give an estimate for the amplitude of the transition between states with different total spins.