Learn what excellence is, how to identify it...This is not a big reading assignment – excellence is scarce, lognormal, long-tailed. Acting on this knowledge is liberating, freeing oneself from vast piles of triviality, knock-offs, petty connoisseurship, over-publishing, and the short-sighted, trendy, greedy. Excellence is long-term knowledge, even forever knowledge.
Excellence, like good taste, is perhaps a universal quality. Analytical thinking is about the relationship between evidence and conclusions, and is fundamental to all empirical work, regardless of field, discipline, specialty. Thus it is possible at times to assess credibility of nonfiction work without being a content expert. Thinking eyes may well have an eye for excellence, regardless of field or discipline.
In your head, you'll probably find two models for writing.
One is the familiar model taught in high school and college—a matter of outlines and drafts and transitions and topic sentences and argument.
The other model is its antithesis—the way poets and novelists are often thought to write.
Words used to describe this second model include "genius", "inspiration", "flow", and "natural", sometimes even "organic".
Both models are useless.
I should qualify that sentence.
Both models are completely useless.
You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren't genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him?
You are undoubtedly familiar with this situation: You’re struggling with a problem—a tough work or school assignment, a complicated relationship, the prospects of a career change—and you cannot figure out what to do. So you decide to take a walk, and somewhere along that trek, the answer comes to you.
The roji, the garden path which leads from the machiai to the tea room, signified the first stage of meditation—the passage into self-illumination. The roji was intended to break connection with the outside world, and to produce a fresh sensation conducive to the full enjoyment of aestheticism in the tea room itself. One who has trodden this garden path cannot fail to remember how his spirit, as he walked in the twilight of evergreens over the regular irregularities of the stepping stones, beneath which lay dried pine needles, and passed beside the moss-covered granite lanterns, became uplifted above ordinary thoughts. One may be in the midst of a city, and yet feel as if he were in the forest far away from the dust and din of civilization.
...Thus prepared the guest will silently approach the sanctuary, and, if a samurai, will leave his sword on the rack beneath the eaves, the tea room being preeminently the house of peace. Then he will bend low and creep into the room through a small door not more than three feet in height. This proceeding was incumbent on all guests—high and low alike—and was intended to inculcate humility.