Brian, Author at Make This Your Last Time

February 7, 2026February 7, 2026 - 8 Comments

6 Ways to Reclaim Your Time & Energy While Studying for the Bar Exam (Even If You’re Working Full Time)

Your hair feels gross, the fridge is empty, and you’ve been scraping together whatever free time you can.

Words in front of you are jumbling together into a blurry mess, passing by like a dream and also slipping away like one.

I’ve been where you are. In a way, I’m still there.

Bar prep steeps you in this undercurrent of anxiety because there’s so much to study with so little time and you’re feeling the pressure from the exam getting closer and closer. The worst combination.

But it’s not just time. Time isn’t your scapegoat. “Life is short” is propaganda by people who wasted their time.

“Yeah maybe when I have more time. I’m going to feel motivated someday. Everything happens for a reason.”

Oh, okay.

We like to tell people we “don’t have time” or that “time is the most valuable resource” or that “life is short” (even though we love to procrastinate).

That’s because time is not actually your most valuable resource.

You ALSO need ENERGY and ATTENTION. You need CLARITY so you can be productive.

You ever see those everyone-has-24-hours “motivational quotes”? Even if you “had the time,” it doesn’t mean jack unless you have the mental energy to do something with it.

If you’re “running out of time,” it just means you’re almost finally done. But you have to use your energy well.

Here are 6 rules to take back your time and energy while studying for the bar exam (even if you’re working full time):

February 6, 2026February 7, 2026 - No Comments

How a Foreign Attorney Passed New York (First Try) When MORE Practice Was Making Her Feel Worse

Louise did everything bar takers are told to do.

She started with a commercial bar prep program. She tried over a thousand MBE questions. She tracked her mistakes.

On paper, she was doing enough. But she still felt stuck.

💬 “I’m an LLM student, and I’ve already completed over a thousand questions on AdaptiBar, but I keep stagnating around 54%. I scored 62% on a past NCBE exam, but despite that, I feel like I’m going backward.”

💬 “The more questions I do, the more lost I feel. I always take the time to review my mistakes and write down what went wrong, yet each new batch of questions seems to introduce rules I’ve never seen, and I struggle to identify them in the fact patterns.”

This sounds incredibly frustrating especially when you’re a foreign-trained attorney trying to make sense of American law.

💬 “I was starting from zero doctrinal familiarity. I’m a French-trained attorney and genuinely did not know American law at the outset, so everything had to be built from the ground up.”

But Louise went from zero knowledge to passing the July 2025 New York UBE on her first attempt.

💬 “I just wanted to let you know that I received a passing score on every UBE section.”

January 31, 2026February 4, 2026 - 1 Comment

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:

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

January 30, 2026February 6, 2026 - 1 Comment

How Michelle Passed the California Bar Exam from Scratch (Years After Graduating)

Michelle wrote me randomly after passing the California Bar Exam months ago.

💬 “I woke up feeling grateful for the circumstances of my life yesterday and realized that so many of those things came to pass because I passed the CBX in Feb 2025. It was my first time in CA. I went to law school in AL and graduated in 2018. The material wasn’t fresh or familiar.”

That’s why it’s best to pass the bar exam and escape limbo as soon as you can. Opportunities and doors fling open once you have your license in hand.

Michelle passed California on her first try despite being YEARS removed from law school (outside California) and from the last bar exam she attempted.

💬 “I sat for NC July 2019, failed. We moved to CA in 2021 and I decided to sit for CA in February 2025, first attempt and passed.”

💬 “I did not go to law school in CA. It had been years since I graduated law school. It had been years since I needed to do deep study. The CA bar exam tragically low pass rate intimidated me.”

It’s possible to prepare for the bar exam from scratch. Even without a bar review course. Even with family. Even with an illness.

💬 “I had a family and young children, a chronic illness, and a mother that was going through chemotherapy.”

💬 “I used Barbri previously. I was a Barbri rep, and my course was free, but I knew that Barbri’s schedule was too overwhelming for me. I did not feel in control of my bar prep that time.”

💬 “I knew that I would need to do something different considering that I failed it in NC.”

January 10, 2026January 10, 2026 - 15 Comments

Enjoying Bar Prep: 6 Ways to Make Studying for the Bar Exam More Fun and Effective (Visual Guide)

Is it possible to enjoy bar prep?

It’s one of the dryest things a person can do on this planet. But we retain more and pay more attention when things are enjoyable.

The default, typical approach to bar prep involves sitting still like a statue watching people in a suit drone on as you fantasize about throwing yourself out the window (not your computer though…you already paid the exam laptop fees).

If you’re especially masochistic, you’ll pause the video and make sure to fill in all the lecture notes because you think your Barbri books will be a fine addition to your future library.

This is all surprisingly exhausting.

As a bonus, you’ll also forget 99% of what you listened to. I’d rather watch water boil because at least I’d have something to show for it, like edible pasta.

“Just complete the course! Here’s some busy work! Play it safe and you’ll be fine!”—The National Association of Barbri (probably)

The default way of doing things feels nice because you can’t get anything wrong when you’re just absorbing information. You won’t taste defeat, but you won’t taste victory either.