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