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

Sam ParrFounder of The Hustle $27 Million estimated sale price
Published October 26, 2023 by Fardeen KhanReviewed and edited by Niall Doherty

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

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