I went to a succulents gardening workshop the other day because I figured succulents wouldn’t wither into potpourri like the flowers I had arranged a few weeks ago. There’s a limit to how much talent one person can have, I guess.
There’s no limit to how much I think about bar prep because that’s what I started thinking about when I was listening to the instructor 🤦🏻♂️
I want to share 4 lessons and also photos of my bald-looking succulent bowl:
(First lesson: “You have to kill a lot of plants to be an expert.” 🤯)
There are a LOT of study supplements, resources, and outlines for bar prep. As time passes, more and more get added to your potential repertoire.
Sometimes, the sheer overwhelm causes bar takers to load up on all sorts of materials, attend every workshop, DM everyone offering something — spreading themselves so thin that they end up not using any of it!
The materials collect digital dust, and bar takers end up restarting at square one, exhausted. But “the great aim of education is not knowledge but action.” (Herbert Spencer)
I, too, offer study materials for the California Bar Exam and the Uniform Bar Exam. Here’s my answer to questions about them, including HOW to use them. This will be useful whether or not you use my material.
The only thing I remember from law school is my negotiations professor saying this in class randomly:
“Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.”
It’s so true. Is bar preparation worth doing? Then it’s worth doing right.
We know that we must enjoy the process (not merely fixate on the goal of passing the bar) for sustainable momentum.
Just as what’s enjoyable is personal, bar prep is also personal. Your study plan and schedule are personal.
Sample 4-week study schedule from Passer’s Playbook. This should be a template that’s flexible to YOUR needs and without strict hour-by-hour timing.
After all, you’re the “dean of your own studies.” You’re ultimately responsible for learning the material as well as the skills to apply the material.
You might be working while studying for the bar exam. Maybe you have every day free for bar prep and don’t want to blow this opportunity. Or maybe you only have the first 6 hours of your day free while the kids are in school/Zoom classes.
There are a million ways you could approach this which can’t be captured with a unified master calendar. There is no one-size-fits-all bar prep study schedule. This alone is reason to abandon the cookie-cutter plan and create one that works for your situation.
You may be lost and not sure where to start heading from here. Like you ran into an unfamiliar part of town and your phone dies (which is why I finally got a car charger after months of denial about how good my phone’s battery actually was).
Like the Titanic, going in the right direction is more important than how hard you go.
So here’s a first reminder that will narrow down your routes and simplify the sudoku of choices…
Now that everyone’s here, maybe we stand a chance against the final boss.
You got your books, you announced on social media that you’re going to be super busy for the next 2-3 weeks, and you got your favorite pens and highlighters ready. How hard can it be, right?
But as a first-timer, it’s unclear what to even expect from bar prep. Let me show you a vision of the future and how you can change it, using 20/20 FORESIGHT.
