This Old Writing Trick Helped Build a ​​$27 Million Business

Sam Parr is the founder of The Hustle, a tech and business newsletter started in 2014 and was acquired for an estimated $27M in 2021 💰

In a recent interview, Sam credits an old practice called “copywork” for helping him develop his writing skills…

I believe in copywork. That’s how I learned how to write.

The method is simple: copy the writing of others by hand ✍️

This technique was commonly used to teach children how to write up until the early 1900s.

Sam says…

I could even teach you not to read music and I could just be like, “Look, copy me. Do exactly this.”

[At first] you play Jingle Bells then… Happy Birthday and then… a more complicated song. But you’re copying other people’s work. And then you’re like, “All right, I want to learn Rock n Roll” …

In my opinion, [this is] also the best way to learn how to write… I spent months just locked in a room doing this thing called copyhour. For an hour or two a day, I would just take the best sales letters of all time and I would copy it by hand.

If you’d like to try this yourself, Swiped has 200+ classic print ads that you can view for free 👀

Sam goes on to emphasize…

And you have to [copy the ads] with a pen and paper…. I do it with pen and paper, and then I would learn the texture of the writing. 

Sam believes that’s how you create your style of writing and develop your own voice. Copy, learn, and find patterns 🧐

Even though Sam is a highly-skilled copywriter by now, he still returns to this practice occasionally…

I still do it right before I got to write something… I’ll take a book that I like and I’ll just spend like just ten minutes [copying it].

You could also try something like this to improve skills other than writing.

For example, if you’re learning web design, you could try to recreate a homepage you really like.

Or if you want to become a YouTuber, you could try recreating some classic videos by YouTubers you admire 👍