The Uncomfortable Truth That Most Bar Exam Advice Ignores

My parents were right… I voluntarily picked up the piano again, more than two decades after my last lesson.

Teaching yourself to play a piece on a piano is the epitome of meta-learning (learning how to learn).

Preparing for the bar exam is no different because all of it is actually self-study, even with a course.

Maybe this is happening: You study for weeks. Nothing seems to improve. It still feels hard. You still feel slow. You still feel anxious. You can’t shake the feeling, “This should be working, but it isn’t.”

The learning techniques I’ve been sharing with you for bar prep are what I use personally, like learning to play a piece well enough. I practice what I preach.

I’m not a genius. I’m not a prodigy. I don’t “know any songs.”

But this is what works for me to this day to teach myself anything. You too can teach yourself how to fish instead of waiting for that program to feed you.

Let me share the raw, inconvenient truth about what it means to “get good enough” at bar prep:

1. Why “effortless” is misleading
2. How to use model answers
3. The difference between learning and performance
4. When the right time to feel ready is
5. How to distribute your focus
6. Where memorization shows up
7. What plateaus mean
8. Why time away from the work is part of the work
9. How to deal with performance anxiety
10. Why play with the process
11. A secret but ugly source of motivation

1)        Effortless is the result of effort

Bar prep is very doable. But doable doesn’t necessarily mean easy.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes of a guy who does baseball bat tricks. Even someone at that level failed countless times to get that one perfect take.

Or perhaps it’s failing more times than the average person even attempts that makes someone an expert.

If something looks effortless, that means it’s been done over and over until it became second nature. There is no free lunch. The price has been paid with no guarantees. It was built on more time, error corrections, and preparation than you think.

I wanted to memorialize my piano performances on YouTube. I messed up hundreds and thousands of times during practice, filled my phone with bad takes and deleted them to make space again even after I thought I was ready to record, and sat at the keyboard day after day to capture one good enough version.

My Fitbit thinks I walked a lot, but it’s actually how much my hand moved (tell me this still counts for calories):

How many takes are you willing to do to get the result you want?

I don’t mean you need to spend 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Just because you’re billing 84 hours a week doesn’t mean they’re all billable to yourself, the client of all your efforts.

What’s billable are actions that help lock in the ability to answer what you might see on the exam. Even answering and reviewing 10 MBE questions, copying a model PT answer, or setting up and reviewing essay issues gives you more value than staying stuck in passive consumption. Eat and then digest.

I hate empty “motivational” advice about grinding and working harder than ever and doing whatever it takes. It doesn’t add anything because you already know you’re willing to put in the work.

It’s actually low effort to simply grind busy work and “bill time” without thinking about where you’re headed. Is your harvest actually coming? Or are you plowing a dead field while looking the other way because you’re too deep in to admit it?

Extraordinary results require extraordinary effort—the right kind of effort in the right direction, not just wasting your energy spinning your wheels in place and getting gassed out.

What you want is targeted action on what matters in a sustainable way, relentlessly looking for and patching up gaps in your knowledge and skill.

2)        Learn from the model answers (and MBE explanations)

Calling the bar exam a test of “minimum competence” is pure cope because minimum competence does not mean the bare minimum.

People say not to worry if your essay answer doesn’t look like the model ones.

True, your answers don’t need to be perfect. Good answers are subjective and can take different forms anyway.

But don’t let well-intentioned advice keep you complacent. Perfection isn’t needed, but you don’t want to be mediocre and bullshit your way through all of your answers either.

Strive for the ideal. The way to get to good answers is to try to emulate the model answers. Shoot for the stars and land on the moon (or maybe it’s the other way around).

When I practice a new piece, I start by listening to how the end product should sound. That’s the model answer. I do this before I try to follow the notes, trying model my sounds after that perfect version. I listen to it again as I refine my playing and adjust it to my liking. I listen to myself play so I can correct bad habits.

Being able to give the graders what they’re looking for is the goal. Remembering testable issues and rules is simply a prerequisite.

Do you know when to bring up a rule? Can you actually organize the issues and resolve them to their conclusions?

The only way to know is to check your work against sample answers that show how you should sound on the real exam. It’s right there!

3)        Optimize for learning, then optimize for exam performance

I didn’t let myself pick up the tempo until I was able to play the sequence correctly at the previous tempo. If I can’t do it slowly or at all, why pretend otherwise?

“But music should be fun!”

Yes, but it’s actually a lot more fun and motivating when you’re producing something that you’re proud of. Showing yourself progress is the most motivating thing you can do you for yourself.

The point isn’t to be good now, or to play at a fast speed already. That comes over time when you’ve mastered the basics and earned the right to be advanced. Get the fundamentals down before incorporating your own style.

You don’t need to start by attempting practice questions timed, closed-book, grinding through six essays a day, 100 MBE questions, while memorizing all at once!

Going too fast is also sloppy btw. Anyone can slam the keys or go super fast. But what does the listener want to hear? What do the graders want to see?

In the beginning, see if you can even answer an essay and get the issues correctly. Don’t worry about how slowly you’re going. Don’t worry about how many you’re doing. Worry about how well you’re doing them.

I’d rather you spend 20 minutes trying to make sense of an MBE answer explanation than shrug your shoulders and move on. Otherwise, you’re just getting better at being sloppy.

You’re not done yet. If you play it wrong 9 times and then finally get it right 1 time, that’s a fluke. Set your ego aside, and do that question again to make sure you actually know how to do it.

You’re ready to perform once you’re able to make yourself repeatable. In other words, you can play the difficult portion (or answer a question) not just once, but multiple times in a row, without making a mistake.

If you can’t do that now, how do you know you can do it on stage?

4)        Don’t try to be ready before you’re ready

You will become ready as long as you keep trying.

I always remind myself of this whenever I’m wondering why I can’t make the sound that I want.

It’s because I haven’t earned the right yet. I have to give my right hand, left hand, my pedal foot, and body different experiences of how the keys feel. Once I have the mechanics down, I can think about whether I’m playing too slow, too fast, too loudly, too softly, drifting in tempo, rushing, losing rhythmic control, etc.

The point of preparation is that you’re not ready yet but will become ready. If you’re getting perfect scores on your practice questions already, what’s the point of all this?

You’ll get there soon. Systematically, step by step.

You’re not wasting your effort. The bamboo you water shoots up all at once.

5)        Focus more on problematic areas (weak subjects, subtopics, question types)

You will have strong areas and weak areas. They will change over time.

One week it’s a specific subject. The next week it’s the MBE. Another week essays finally click. At some point, you suddenly remember that performance tests exist.

It can feel like one door opens as another closes. That’s normal. Shift more of your attention toward your current weak areas instead of giving everything equal time. Discriminate. An hour spent on your stronger area is worth less than an hour spent on a weak one because the same hour produces more improvement in your weak areas than it does in areas you already handle well.

I don’t practice the whole piece every time. I practice in portions, especially the difficult parts. I jump around. I repeat sections that give me more trouble. I spend more time where I’m weakest right now. I play at different speeds.

I also revisit sections that went well to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. I never said to stop checking on your strong areas. They’ll definitely come in handy on the exam.

6)        Memorization is a byproduct of doing (active practice)

You’re not thinking I was able to memorize these pieces by staring at the sheet music all day… Are you?

LMAO no

Knowing the notes on the sheet music is not a substitute for knowing what they sound like, how my fingers feel like against the keys, which parts of my fingers should be used (there are more than 10 ways to press a key), how my foot should time the pedal. Eventually you need to express the notes faster than you can interpret them.

Just because you’ve heard a song before doesn’t mean you can remember the lyrics. This isn’t a movie about a savant. This is real shit.

Just because you know some words on a page (or definitions for your 5^th grade vocab test) doesn’t guarantee you know how to use them correctly.

But that’s how a lot of bar takers try to approach it. They assume they’ll know how to do everything after watching a lecture, taking good notes, reviewing an outline, or completing certain portions of a program.

All of these are good starting points of course. But it’s backward. It’s continuing to stay on training wheels that trap you into thinking you don’t need them.

The best way to “know” is to DO. The information you consume is useless unless you do something with it.

Ultimately, my fingers, hands, arms, elbows, foot, and even my shoulders and torso know how to play not by thinking about notes. I play over and over until intuition becomes faster than the speed of thought. The sheet music merely becomes a reference in case I need to check.

So give it a try.

You learn to swim by getting in the water, not by studying water. See how it feels to bring up an issue and write down the rule and use it to solve the issue.

Don’t avoid failure. Missed questions are beacons that guide you toward what needs to be done. Attempts to recall are the basis of all memorization.

Eventually, you’ll remember your understanding of the concept, not just the exact phrasing of a rule statement. I could recite beautiful rule statements but still turned in mediocre essays.

It’s true that rote memorization is needed. Use these techniques to aid in retention in combination with practical application (don’t just do one or the other):

• Mnemonics (memorizing the first notes rather than all the individual notes)
• Seeing patterns (chord progressions, matching or sequencing notes on my left and right hands)
• Grouping similar ideas together (noticing repeating phrases)
• Making sense of a rule from a policy perspective (the next notes should progress like this, so I’m going to move my hand there ahead of time)
• Brute-force rote memorizing (I still need to repeat the above 100s and 1000s of times until it gets baked in as muscle memory)
• Visualizing clumps of information (remembering the shapes of the notes) like I lay out in Magicsheets and Approsheets

It helps that you can use tools that are pre-packaged for maximum information organization. (And fine, it helps that I had 12 years of lessons as a young lad.)

But they’re only tools. How are you going to use them?

7)        You will get stuck on plateaus

At some point, it’s common to get to a certain point where you feel stuck.

This isn’t a linear process. You have to stay patient through the ups, downs, and sideways.

This happens in bar prep, fitness, piano, and any skill acquisition.

If your scores stopped budging (or even started dipping), your mind is saturated.

If your practice scores are moving up and down, that’s normal. Don’t expect a constant upward movement.

It means it’s working. Your mind just needs to process what it’s learned. It needs to adjust itself before it’s ready to break through the plateau and go to the next level.

What you gain quickly is often illusory or born from luck.

8)        Let your efforts simmer in you overnight

It’s tempting to “buckle down” and brute force this process. But see if it helps to give your brain time and patience to encode what you practiced into memory.

Take your foot OFF the pedals if you don’t want to drive yourself into a slippery doom.

• If you’re cooking a turkey, you let it sit in the oven, not blast it at max temp
• If you’re trying to get toned or put on muscle, you know that you need to get plenty of rest, eat appropriately, and let your body do its thing over time
• Send that text to your crush, but treat it like a carrier pigeon. You’re not going to stand on the rooftop screaming “Where’s my pigeon???” after 5 mins of silence. Go to sleep or something

(If you only have a few weeks to cram, using short-term memory and adrenaline just might be crazy enough to work.)

Let the snow globe settle and reveal what you’ve built. You can’t do the work if your mind is running on empty. Come back to it tomorrow.

You may not see big changes day to day, but you’ll notice significant improvements over time.

Every time I pick up a new piece, it’s impossible to imagine myself playing it well. But without fail, I see incremental improvements as the nights pass, or even within the same day between sessions.

And seeing yourself get better is the best motivation you can have.

9)        Performance anxiety on the bar exam is real

The bar exam is a performance. Your performance.

There’s a difference between good in practice vs. on the real thing.

I thought I was ready to record myself when I was able to play the piece to near perfection.

Nerves kicked in with the camera rolling. There were more mistakes during rehearsal than I’d assumed. Now one mistake meant I’d have to start all over. I started overthinking and playing differently. Maybe that’s what really happens to particles when they’re observed. (Please clap at this pop science joke.)

I’d put in hundreds of reps off camera to feel ready for recording, and another dozens of attempts on camera before I got to something “good enough.”

On the actual exam, expect to be about 70% as good as your top condition. I’m not saying you will be, but account for that possibility. It’s a real phenomenon.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.”—Archilochus

Know that the exam WILL throw you off—whether you get a weird question that makes you go WTF, bad proctors, lunch breaks where you get lost around the area, loud noises keeping you up when you’re trying to sleep, etc.

This is not a threat. It’s a guarantee.

The solution is to get 120% as good in practice to reach that 70% in reality. Shoot for the moon to land among the stars. (Did I get it right this time?)

Practice under timed conditions. Practice on the same laptop you’ll use. Practice under exam settings (e.g., 3 hours + break + 3 hours).

My cat acts like he pays the rent around here. But all bets are off if I take him outside. It’s a ruff world out there.

If you can’t do it in the comfort of home, can you be sure you can do it outside?

10)     Play with the process

Explore, experiment, and iterate. The stakes are still low, for now.

Most people come to miss bar prep after the exam. Doesn’t that mean bar prep can be more enjoyable than you think?

I can appreciate the classics after 12 years of piano lessons. But now I only play what I’m compelled to play. Something I really enjoy, enough to hear myself failing thousands of times at.

Something relatable to me.
Something I want to master.
Something I want others to hear.

Seeing yourself improve is the best motivation. You won’t see yourself improve if all you’re doing is sitting around listening to other people play.

Do what you need to do to make this process enjoyable.

11)      You can’t get on stage in an innocent state

Preparation for the bar exam is sustained over a period of time.

Three ways to do that:

First, accept the process. Lean into the discomfort, and enjoy the process (see above).

Second, have a strong desire for the outcome. It’s incredibly hard to focus on studying if you have an unclear motivation for it.

Anyone can get a short burst of motivation from someone patting them on the back. (“You got this!”) Anyone can SAY they want to pass the bar.

I’ve seen people say it but whose actions say otherwise. They’re off doing other things instead of just admitting they don’t feel a need to pass. I’m sympathetic to their situations, but it’s also frustrating to see them drag it out and disappear after making me encourage them for years or answer vague questions that show they’re not thinking about this at all (I’m not your AI). I’d rather share my time and attention with those who have a real desire to engage with the process.

Why did I want to play the piano and make videos again after all these years?

I wanted a hobby, sure. That’s a good answer. An interview answer. It’s true.

There are good answers. And then there are real answers.

The second part of my answer from deep in my soul: I wanted acknowledgment.

From my Hinge matches.

From that one friend who takes too long to get back to me because he’s busy with dad life now.

From friends I’m increasingly loosely connected with but vaguely aware of thanks to that lame “people grow apart” excuse.

From anyone who will see my channel at the whims of YouTube’s algorithm. For that one singular moment of being witnessed by someone and hearing “that was good.”

From my dad who I want connection and conversation with instead of one-way lectures and advice I never asked for. I suppose we both need someone to hear us.

“In the end, any art form is really just an excuse to meet another human being.”

We’re ultimately driven by our hearts. We don’t get on stage in an innocent state.

Do you think people get fit just to be healthy, or to force people to admire their sexy aesthetics? They might be vain desires, but no one can take them away from you.

What are your embarrassing reasons driving you to pass the bar exam and be an attorney? What do you want to prove to the world? What’s your (real) reason for getting up on stage?

• Because you’re ambitious and “want to be a lawyer”? Or because you might as well get your license after investing 3 years in law school?
• For a stable career? What about cash to pay your rent or that mistake of a mortgage? Are you the only one who can do something about an unfair and complicated life situation?
• To help people? What about prestige and a nice photo in a suit you rarely wear? Do you want to be partner at a big firm and buy a house in Aspen you’ll use one day?
• You’re supposed to since you have nothing else to do after graduating? (Fair enough)

All of these are valid reasons btw. Feel free to tell me your most wholesome and most diabolical thoughts.

A third, secret source of motivation: Ugly, petty, desperate, embarrassing, vulnerable desires born from your most personal moments.

I can polish a piano piece daily and talk about bar prep for 12 fucking years because I want to tell the world, “I’m here.”

All of this collapses into a simple truth

“Minimum competence” sounds comforting. Actually building it comes from doing the right thing, in the right way, over and over again when no one is looking.

But people under pressure don’t think about what’s right.

Some are afraid of uncertainty.
Some are afraid of failure.
Some are afraid of success.
Some are overwhelmed.
Some are desperate.
Some cling to control and delusion.
Some read off someone else’s script.
Some gamble.
Some overthink.
Some chase a quick fix instead of committing to real preparation, then give up when it’s not the shortcut they hoped for.

They are in a haze, breathing with their jaw hanging open, eating what’s fed to them, thinking big automatically means useful, listening to the voice that sounds the most certain because every day is an emergency to them.

How do I know?

I was all of them. And I can’t bear to watch the same pattern play out year after year.

Enough with the noise. You already know what to do.

If bar prep has felt exhausting or demoralizing, it doesn’t mean you’re behind or that it’s your fault. You just need to break free of the illusion that you don’t have what it takes.

That’s the other reason I desperately try to get the message to you. That’s why I continue to build my study tools. To empower you to trust your legs and get it done.

You already have agency. The bar prep industrial complex tells you that you need them. You don’t. You don’t need me either.

You just need to know how to bleed the right way.