I read biographies and steal the useful bits.
Copy John is a daily newsletter about the routines, habits, strategies and mistakes of history’s greats — and what a normal person can actually do with them.
Where this came from
I spent a long time writing about copywriting. Several hundred emails on headlines, clients, outreach, the lot. It was fine. I got bored of it.
What I kept coming back to instead was the same question in every biography I read: what did this person actually do all day? Not their philosophy. Their Tuesday.
Because the philosophy is usually useless and the Tuesday is usually stealable.
What I actually do here
I pick a person, find what’s documented about how they worked, strip out the myth that’s accumulated around it, and work out whether any of it transfers.
Sometimes it does. Napoleon’s approach to the night before genuinely fixes mornings. Beethoven’s walk is the best advice I know for a stuck page.
Sometimes it very much doesn’t. Balzac drank himself to death on coffee. That’s not a productivity hack, it’s a coroner’s report.
Both are worth writing about.
A warning
A lot of the people I write about were difficult, unpleasant, or considerably worse. I’m not holding them up as role models. Studying how someone operated is not the same as admiring them, and the failures are frequently more instructive than the wins.
The newsletter
One email a day, about three minutes. Free.
Or start with the best of it first.
What the Copy John newsletter covers
The Copy John newsletter is about self-discipline, focus and better daily habits, told through the people who actually lived them. Each issue takes one documented routine — Franklin’s six-block day, Churchill’s afternoon nap, Kant’s forty-year schedule — checks where the story really comes from, and turns it into something you can try this week.
The site groups everything by the problem you are trying to fix:
- How to be more disciplined
- How to wake up early
- How to focus better
- How to stop procrastinating
- How to stop being lazy
How the work gets made: I pick the subject and the angle, research the primary sources, and use AI tools to help draft and edit. Every factual claim is checked against a named source before it goes out, and where a famous story rests on a single unreliable witness, the article says so.