Become A Better Writer In 60 Minutes (Masterclass)

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
What I'm about to say will win you the respect of your friends, a lifetime full of happiness, a villa in the Bahamas, and maybe a really good hair day too. I don't know if it's gonna do any of those things, who's to say, but here's what it will do. It'll definitely make you a better writer. That's my promise, you will be a better writer in the next 60 minutes.
This week, somebody asked us a question. They said, hey, I really love your guys' writing. I have trouble with writing.
And I would love if you guys just did an episode with the 80-20. So what is the, just the stuff I need to know to help me be a better writer. So me and Sam sat down and we wrote down all of our secrets about how we've used writing to grow our careers.

**Sam Parr** (0:46)
Which, but by the way, by the way, I wouldn't even say we're necessarily great writers. I would say that you and I are really good writers, but what we've been great at is getting results from it. Would you agree?

**Shaan Puri** (0:58)
Yeah, that's right. I don't think, I don't look at my stuff. I'm like, wow, this is beautiful prose, but I do feel confident that if I needed to, I can use my writing to either grow an audience or sell a product or convince people of something. I feel confident in that after trying for 15 years. And both of us have done it, right? So the credibility here, before you ever listen to any advice, you should ask yourself, why should I listen to this person? Well, both me and Sam have built and sold newsletter businesses for tens of millions of dollars. We've tweeted our way, just typing little short sentences to a million person audience between the two of us.
I've sold maybe $20 million worth of product online in the e-commerce world just through email.
We both have taught writing courses or in some form or fashion. I used to charge $1,000 a seat for my class. And there was the highest rated class on Maven. But here today, you get the quick version for free. We're charging you nothing, except for there is one thing they gotta do.
What do they have to do? This is free, right, Sam?

**Sam Parr** (1:54)
It's totally free, except for one thing. You have to subscribe. So whether you're listening on Apple, on Spotify, wherever you're listening, or if you're already on YouTube, you just gotta click that button. We spent all this time doing this. And unlike the rest of the YouTube world, where everything is completely free, we're mostly free. All we want in exchange is a subscribe on YouTube. That's all we want.

**Shaan Puri** (2:14)
We can't check if you do it. We call it the Gentleman's Agreement. It's just honor code amongst two legendary individuals, us and you.
And we just trust that you're gonna do it.
All right, so let's jump in. How does somebody become a better writer? How can we teach them in the next, I don't know, 45 minutes to become, you know, twice as good or three times as good as a writer? I believe that that is possible if they actually do these things. Where do you wanna start, Sam?

**Sam Parr** (2:39)
So let's start with before you guys start writing. And so someone asks us why write, or someone asks us, how do you get better at writing? I actually wanna change it to why you should even care about being a better writer.
And so there's a few bullet points that we have. So the first being is, this is the most self-serving thing, but I wanna say it upfront.
It's persuasion in the most scalable way. The reason I got into writing was I was selling street meat, hot dogs on the side of the road, and I was selling one-to-one, and I got pretty good at it. But then I realized, this is really hard.
And so I learned about copywriting and I figured, look, now I can write something and it could scale to an infinite amount of people. I never have to change it and I can convince people to do something. Now we're not just talking about copywriting, we're talking about all types of writing. So I can convince someone to feel a certain way, whether I'm writing a short story or I'm writing a blog post, I can convince someone to join my company. I use copywriting on Tinder when I want to convince a girl to give me a chance to go on a date with me. We're talking about all types of writing, but at the end of the day, we're always typically trying to persuade someone to do something. So it's persuasion in the most scalable way. And that's one of the reasons, one of the most important self-serving reasons why I think people should care about writing. What else?