Motivation Archives | Make This Your Last Time

June 20, 2026June 21, 2026 - 5 Comments

Common Traits of Bar Passers & Why Mental Fortitude Is Important for Bar Preparation

They say knowledge is power (and you can never have too much power).

But why is it that with all the information out there, we don’t always get to where we want to go? Why do 80 percent of New Year resolutions fail by February? Remember those? LOL

“If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”

Knowledge is potential energy. It’s what we DO with the knowledge, not the fact that we have it, not the fact that we declare our desire.

If you have the raw material but can’t bring yourself to make a sand castle, if you can’t turn that potential energy in your mind into kinetic energy, what’s the use?

Knowledge applied correctly is power.

The top differentiator I’ve encountered with people taking the bar exam isn’t skills or knowledge. It’s HOW they think and how they approach their studies. The hurdle is often internal.

"half of bar prep involves preparing oneself mentally"

"the bar exam is all about your mental fitness and your ability to retain a crap ton of information without going crazy. Take care of yourself this time around."

If you observe people who have passed the bar exam long enough, you’ll notice some patterns in their behavior:

February 21, 2026February 21, 2026 - 2 Comments

5 Reframes to Power Up Your Mind and Emotions for the Bar Exam Right Now

Preparing for the bar exam forces you to cycle through various emotions over weeks and months.

One moment calm, feeling like you’ve done all you could. Panic and anxiety the next moment. Frustration. Utter confusion. Overwhelm. Back to relief. Rinse and repeat.

Your heart is beating uncontrollably, your thoughts are becoming irrational, and your palms are sweaty! 🥵 You’re feeling HOT!

Go from hot ⤵

To cool

When you’re in trouble, breathe and go back to the fundamentals.

Reality can betray the most reasonable of your expectations and daydreams at whim, coloring the past with regrets and the future with despair.

It can also present us with gifts if you look carefully. Some days you have to look much harder than other days.

But if life only gives you lemons, you weren’t looking out for the oranges.

Here are five philosophies you can apply right now to mentally reframe how you feel about the bar exam:

February 17, 2026June 10, 2026 - 5 Comments

Tired of Bar Prep? Guarantee Motivation to Beat the Bar Exam with These 5 Reminders

How often do you see motivationals like this?

You’re doing totally fine!!!
You’re going to pass!!! BELIEVE IT!
My all-time favorite: YOU GOT THIS!!!!! (“I needed to hear this today!”)

But what do you do to pick yourself back up in your most defeated moments when you don’t believe you got this?

I wanted to pass the bar exam.

So instead of actually preparing for it, I made an image of a bar license card with my name on it using Microsoft Paint. You know, for visualization and manifestation like random people suggested online.

I’m not even kidding. Look and cringe:

February 14, 2026May 31, 2026 - 1 Comment

40 Bar Prep Lessons for My 40th Birthday

Today’s my birthday! Yep, on Valentine’s Day.

Turning 40 feels much different from turning 30.

People would joke about how back pain starts in your 30s. The “joke” would get real tiring after the first time. For a whole decade, I thought they were being dramatic. Then my back started hurting a few months ago.

My metabolism too has tanked, and my skin is stretching and sagging in ways never seen before. And worst of all, I’m NOT as funny as I was a decade ago (in case that explains things) 😩

Seeing the “4” in my age reminds me that I’ve lived a long time. That I’ve been making this your last time for a long time, since I was 28.

And I’m not slowing down. In fact, I have plans to do even more.

It also means I’ve seen some things (in bar prep at least).

What matters? What’s noise? What are patterns, mistakes, traps, and breakthroughs that inevitably happen?

Some ideas have evolved as I spoke with thousands of bar takers, but most of what I believe about bar prep is what I believed when I first started writing about it. “How to prepare for the bar exam” hasn’t changed.

To celebrate turning 40, my gift to you is 40 quick lessons about bar prep before the exam.

January 31, 2026May 7, 2026 - 2 Comments

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