I received this email as a member of Nick Disabato’s list today. I read over, multiple times, and bewildered by its purpose:

My friend Kurt recently pointed out a search engine for plagiarized content and threw some of my letters in there. He came up with thousands of examples of people who had ripped off my letters, Draft Revises marketing page, Draft’s home page, and so on.

I always knew that people were ripping me off, but it hadn’t really hit home until I started subscribing to others’ mailing lists and saw my welcome letter, word for word, sent back to me. Not only were people ripping me off, but they were doing it pretty badly: the words Draft Revise even remained in others’ marketing pages. When confronted by others, they would then blame it on contractors they had hired.

So, I should speak about this. I will come right out and say it: As a designer and writer, I don’t care if you rip off my work. Go ahead and do it. Forward this exact letter to your own mailing list. Paste a photo of my face on the front page of your website. Print Cadence & Slang’s PDF out and conduct a dramatic reading of it from the roof of your office building. The world is your oyster.

And that is where my support for this ends. As a consultant, as someone who is here to teach you the best techniques for running a successful business, it will be absolutely disastrous for you to rip off my, or anyone else’s, work.

It’s good to use a specific marketing technique or sales letter, as it helps you build on the shoulders of giants. But there is no substitute for your own voice. You must write. You must. You must write and it must be your own words. There is no other way. You must think into a text editor, and then use the text editor to get the text into the brains of your audience. There are no shortcuts to the act of original, well-considered writing.

Even worse, it is bad business to rip off anyone’s work. Stealing work makes you look bad as a writer, consultant, and thinker. You need to get to making the clackity noise now because it’ll help you develop a strong, confident voice for yourself. Please don’t use me or anyone else as a crutch for not sitting down and doing the work. And then profit.

Don’t do this, it’s just a rant. What benefit can this email have to his readers? We should be delivering content of value. This is far from valuable, written in haste and anger.

Dear reader, would you find this offensive or a waste of your time had you received it? Do you find any value in the words Nick wrote?