How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel and important? Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing this. I learned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a horror of saying anything dumb. His trick is not to say anything unless he's sure it's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him, but when you do,... See more

Let's put them all together. Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.