A couple of days ago, I saw a graphic of a bunny sitting on a log comforting an obviously distressed unicorn, “Here,” take my confidence in you until you can find yours again.” Alas, that is my role in bar prep.
These last important days leading into the bar exam feel so sacred, like they are protected by an impermeable membrane, where nothing real touches you and everything real is about the bar exam. I know this feeling. I like to think that by this point I have done everything I have available in my vault of wisdom for every one of you. That is not always the same, depending on who you came to me as and what you were able to incorporate of my process into your own self-concept.
OK, so I did not hit 100 percent of my intended goal with any of you, any more than you hit 100 percent of your goal in prep. Maybe that is the lead for this send-off. I have said this to most of you before about the zero-sum approach: nothing is everything, but everything matters. It is all just a series of increments. So with that as our core concept, here we go, into that last space I can offer myself into in your journey.
There are many aspects of the human condition: joy, fear, ambition, ego, confidence, pain. These are the conditions I find most relevant to this test, and the process for its preparation. They each have a place, but none deserves full prominence. Truly, the over-emphasis of any one of these emotions means you get in your output only what that particular focus offers. If you are all ego, your prep will be focused on feeling good about yourself to the exclusion of real self-reflection. Conversely, if you are all fear, then all your decisions from day-to-day will go toward preserving yourself in defense of your fear; you will experience paralysis, and then you cannot stretch, and grow, and face your weaknesses in time to fix them. This is also true in the macro analysis of life. If you are governed by one motivator, let’s say fear, then all your choices in life will serve only that one emotion; you will have safety but no opportunity to change. You will keep a bad job, stay in a bad relationship, suffer for the sake of reliable conditions. Yet if you are too confident or fearless, you will risk at the sake of constancy and have a steady state of disequilibrium.
But know that you are always capable of recalibrating and responding to the moment as it demands. In these last days of prep, and on the test itself, and arguably in all of your life, you must study what the moment demands and move fluidly into that urgency. The test itself, as a micro-environment of your big-picture choices, is a concentrated version of all the years, months, weeks, moments, and your decisions within them, that got you into that room on test day. Do not make the test any larger than those incremental steps. All of them, alone, are as important as this day: your undergraduate work, your LSAT score, your ability to survive the first year of law school, AND this exam. You might make it the big barrier between you and your dream, but realistically any one of those other incremental steps could have been the end of your lawyering journey — if you let them. But you didn’t. And you wouldn’t have even entertained giving up during any of them. This test should be a mirror of your efforts over time. It is not everything, but rather the culmination of everything up to this point, just like every incremental step before. After the license you must face the reality of lawyering, which is its own sobering increment.
I assure you that during each important increment you were facing your biggest lifetime challenge, but just like the test, it is only one of many. I expect you will move through your multiple-choice questions with the cadence you developed in your practice and learn to make the choice to either linger on a question that you feel you can answer accurately or move on from one you know you cannot. You will use your time based on your best strategy, select the words on your written work that express your thoughts best, leave some thoughts behind, order your effort according to proficiency, and do all of that while deciding what emotion will govern in the moments that make up the big picture. You will recalibrate. That is, by the way, the whole of your life, of your legal path, of this test prep, and the two days that make up the test: you are making decisions based on what emotion you are allowing to govern. I am not saying fear is unnecessary. It is! But it’s no more important than confidence or humility. And as a sole motivator, consider where you go from complete fear; nowhere you want to be. I promise you that.
I hope you know that if you recognize yourself in this send-off, that’s because it’s you that make up these words. I have had these very conversations with many of you, and for the first time, this bar exam, because you all made me what I have become in my incremental growth. You are all my source, every day and every bar, to recalibrate, to grow into my next increment.
Could I have imagined this at the beginning of my journey? No. And if I tried it would have shut me completely down with fear. But I grew in steps into the place where I know I am qualified to do this work. And with that, I send you off knowing that you, too, are ready for this next increment. Take it as only that. Leave the next step for its own increment.
Today though, in this increment, you are ready to take this test.
