The Hidden Mechanics of Bar Exam Success: Mind

I’m sitting at my desk right now as the sun rises. The light is filtering through the blinds, warming my face, and U2’s Beautiful Day is playing in the background.

Instantly, I’m transported back to January 2006.

I was on my way to my first Cultural Anthropology 101 class at Rutgers University. The course was taught by Professor Angelique Haugerud, and like many introductory classes at a large university, it was held in a massive lecture hall packed with well over a hundred students.

To be honest, those giant introductory courses could feel overwhelming. Typically, you end up checked out and unengaged. Most students are there because the course satisfies a requirement. You showed up, found a seat, took notes, and moved on.

But walking into that lecture hall on that cold January day felt different. 

There was this low pulsing beat coming through the speakers, almost as if inviting us into the room. 

Beautiful Day was playing. 

It sounded like a heartbeat. And before I knew it, my own heart was moving to the same rhythm.

Before the lecture began.
Before a single anthropological concept had been introduced. 

Something had happened. 

I remember feeling excited.
Curious.
Comfortable.
And connected. 

I wasn’t the only one. Looking around, I had the sense that everyone else felt it too.

You might be wondering what any of this has to do with passing the bar exam. 

It has everything to do with it.

Most people assume learning begins when you open an outline or hit the play button on your video lecture.

But I’m starting to realize there is an art to learning that we’ve slowly forgotten — an understanding of why some information sticks while other information disappears the moment we need it.

The older I get, the less interested I am in how much people study and the more interested I am in how people actually learn.

I’ve become convinced that many examinees spend months trying to solve the wrong problem. The issue often isn’t effort or intelligence. It’s learning.

To understand that process, we will look at learning through three distinct lenses:

Mind.
Process.
Person.

This three-part series explores ten overlooked reasons bar examinees struggle to make progress, even when they are putting in substantial time and effort.

In Part I, we begin with Mind. We’ll explore attention, meaning, and will. 

Attention: You Weren’t Fully Focused When You Learned the Law

The Problem

You’re working harder than ever. You’re completing MBE questions, reviewing explanations, and spending hours with the material. Yet somehow you keep finding yourself staring at an answer explanation thinking, “I haven’t even heard of this before.”

The natural response is to assume you need more practice.

But what good is practice if you never primed your brain first?

Now, I’m not talking about examinees who skipped the black letter law altogether. I’m talking about examinees who sat down, opened the outline, watched the lecture, or read the explanation, but weren’t fully present while doing so.

Because here’s the thing: we spend a lot of time talking about retrieval. We talk about memorization. We talk about recall. We talk about what happens on exam day when you need to pull a rule out of your brain.

What we don’t talk about nearly enough is how that information got there in the first place.

In the beginning, there was attention.
That attention became understanding.
That understanding eventually became recall.

But if attention was missing from the very beginning, why should we expect recall to magically appear later?

Sometimes a stagnant score isn’t a retrieval problem.
Sometimes it’s an attention problem.

The Science

Learning scientists generally agree that information must first pass through working memory before it can become durable knowledge. Attention sits at the very beginning of that process.

In many ways, attention functions like a gate. Every day, your brain is exposed to more information than it can possibly process. Attention helps determine what information receives priority, enters working memory, and has an opportunity to be learned.

This helps explain why two examinees can spend the same amount of time studying and experience completely different results. Time alone does not determine learning. Attention matters too.

When attention is fragmented, learning becomes more difficult—not because the information wasn’t presented, but because it was never fully processed in the first place.

Researchers have also found that attention is influenced by a variety of factors. Interest, curiosity, and personal relevance can all shape our willingness to engage with information. The way we interact with material matters as well. Even stress can influence our ability to focus and learn.

Research further suggests that interest plays a powerful role in directing and sustaining attention. When learners find material meaningful, relevant, or engaging, they tend to devote more attention to it and remain engaged longer.

Effective learners also tend to do more than simply consume information. They monitor their understanding, adapt their strategies, structure their environment, and respond constructively to confusion, frustration, and setbacks. 

Learning is not something that simply happens to them. It is something they actively shape.

Taken together, the research suggests that effective learning depends on more than exposure to information. Learning improves when attention is captured, interest is sustained, learners actively engage with content, environments support focus, and individuals respond to setbacks in ways that keep them engaged with the learning process.

In other words, attention is shaped by the conditions under which learning takes place.

The Fix 

If attention sits at the beginning of the learning process, the question becomes: How do we improve it?

Attention thrives when four things are present: Interest. Interaction. Environment. Grace.

Interest

We naturally pay more attention to things we find meaningful, interesting, or relevant. Years ago, I learned much of Florida Trusts by embedding the concepts into a trip I had taken through Turkey. The entire subject became a sequence of locations, experiences, and memories. Instead of memorizing isolated rules, I was remembering the trip itself. 

The law hadn’t changed, but my relationship to the material had. Suddenly, a subject that felt abstract had become personal.

Think about how you can take a subject you don’t naturally care about and make it meaningful to you. 

Maybe you’ll use your Real Property knowledge one day to help a tenant facing eviction. 

Or maybe you’ll connect your love of music, trains, history, rocks, or technology to a legal concept you’re struggling to remember. 

The connection doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. It only has to make sense to you. Some of the strongest memory cues are the ones we create ourselves.

Do you.

Interaction

Learning is not a spectator sport.

The more ways you interact with information, the more opportunities your brain has to create connections.

Reading, listening, drawing, questioning, explaining, organizing, and connecting information all require different forms of mental engagement. Each interaction gives your brain another opportunity to make sense of what it is learning.

Interaction is often a combination of two things: strategy and personalization. The strategy helps you engage with the material. The personal connection helps make it memorable.

For example, I love PB&J sandwiches. One of my favorite generative learning strategies is mapping. I’ll draw a map of new material and then analyze that map looking for patterns and relationships.

Civil Procedure kicks off with jurisdiction. The “J” reminds me of jelly. Immediately, I smell a PB&J sandwich.

Now my jurisdiction concepts are hidden inside a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Jurisdiction is the jelly.

Personal Jurisdiction becomes the Peanut Butter & Jelly sandwich (PJ).

Subject Matter Jurisdiction becomes the Strawberry Jelly sandwich (SJ).

Suddenly, I’m not staring at abstract legal terminology anymore. All I needed to do was smell or visualize a sandwich.

The point isn’t that everyone should use peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to learn Civil Procedure. The point is that I was doing something with the information. I wasn’t simply reading it. I was connecting it to memories, experiences, and ideas that already existed inside my mind.

The more personally meaningful the connection becomes, the more memorable it often becomes.

After all, your memories, interests, hobbies, and experiences already exist inside your brain. Why not use them?

Environment

Attention is fragile. It can be pulled away by notifications, social media, anxiety, exhaustion, and sometimes the people around us.

The environment around us is constantly competing for our attention. Some influences support learning. Others quietly pull us away from it.

This is one reason I encourage examinees to be mindful of the people, content, and messages they allow into their study space. If you are constantly surrounded by negativity, criticism, or voices telling you that you can’t do this, that matters too.

Sometimes protecting your attention means protecting your environment.

It can also help to develop a consistent study routine. Maybe it’s the same desk. The same playlist. The same cup of coffee. The same walk before you begin studying.

The routine itself isn’t magic. It creates conditions that signal to your brain that it’s time to focus and learn.

You will never eliminate every distraction. What matters is creating an environment where attention has a chance to thrive.

Grace

Giving yourself grace is not the same thing as abandoning discipline. 

Discipline still matters. 
Showing up still matters. 
Accountability still matters. 

But healthy learning also requires recognizing that attention is not infinite. 

Some days you will need a short break. Other days you’ll be mentally exhausted. Some days progress will feel slower than you hoped. Some days a concept will refuse to click no matter how hard you try.

Grace means responding to those moments in a way that keeps you connected to the learning process instead of pushing you away from it.

It is not an excuse to quit. It is a reminder to return.

You do not need to be perfect. You just need to come back.

Be patient with yourself.
Learning often feels uncomfortable before it feels rewarding.
The confusion, frustration, and mental fatigue you experience along the way are not necessarily signs that you’re failing.

Sometimes they are signs that your brain is doing the difficult work of building new understanding.

Meaning: The Material Never Became Personally Significant

The Problem

So you opened up your guide ready to learn Civil Procedure and realized you don’t give a fuck.

I hear you.

You’re sitting there reading a question about intervention as of right under Rule 24, mixed with a collateral order doctrine issue involving an immediate interlocutory appeal. You’re trying to memorize timing requirements, balancing tests, and multi-part standards. Your eyes are moving across the page, but your brain is actively rejecting the words.

It feels distant. Abstract. Like an alien language that has absolutely nothing to do with your life, your future, or the reality you live in.

The natural response is to assume you simply need more repetition.

Maybe one more review. Maybe one more lecture. Maybe one more set of flashcards.

But information rarely becomes memorable simply because we repeated it. More often, it becomes memorable because it connected to something that already mattered to us.

A memory. A story. A goal. A fear. A passion. A part of our identity.

When a legal concept never becomes personally significant, it often remains exactly what it started as: a collection of words on a page.

And if the material never means anything to you, your brain has very little incentive to hold onto it.

The Science

Educational researchers have long distinguished between rote learning and meaningful learning.

Rote learning occurs when information is remembered in much the same form in which it was presented. Meaningful learning goes a step further. It occurs when learners make sense of new information, connect it to what they already know, and become capable of using it in new situations. In other words, meaningful learning is not simply about remembering. It is about understanding.

One explanation for this process comes from theories of meaningful learning and schema theory. Researchers have found that new information is often learned more effectively when it can be connected to existing knowledge, experiences, and mental frameworks already stored in memory. Rather than existing as isolated facts, new ideas become integrated into a broader network of meaning.

This helps explain why repetition alone often falls short. Repetition may increase familiarity, but familiarity is not the same thing as meaning. We can review a rule ten times and still struggle to remember it if the rule never becomes connected to anything that matters to us.

Stories provide one example of this principle in action.

Think about the opening of my Northstar article. An attorney is lying face down on the asphalt. Before you know anything about the legal issue being discussed, you want to know what happened.

Why?

Because the story gave the information meaning.

Suddenly, the information that follows is no longer just information. It exists within a framework that gives it context and significance.

The same principle applies to learning.

In many ways, the brain is not simply asking, “What is this?“

It is also asking, “Where does this fit?“

When a legal concept becomes connected to a story, memory, goal, fear, passion, or something else that already matters to you, it becomes easier to organize, understand, and remember. The concept is no longer standing alone. It has become attached to something that already exists inside your mind.

The Fix 

The next time you open your outline and realize you don’t give a fuck, stop reading.

Stop trying to memorize words that mean nothing to you. Step back from the page and change your relationship to the material.

If the law itself won’t change, try changing its significance.

Think about the concepts you’re avoiding right now. If they feel like abstract, floating text, it may be because they have not connected to anything that already matters to you.

Look for the human drama hidden inside the fact pattern. These aren’t math equations. They are frozen snapshots of people at their best and worst. Someone is losing a business. Someone is fighting for custody of a child. Someone is being evicted. Someone is trying to protect their life savings.

Find the human stake in the chaos.

The moment you care about how the story ends, the material is no longer just information. 

You can also project the law onto your own experiences. Do what I did with Turkey. Take a dry legal concept and attach it to a memory, a place, a relationship, a hobby, or a story that already means something to you.

Let the law borrow significance from something your brain already values.

Not every legal concept will become exciting.

But it can become meaningful.

Will: You’ve Forgotten How Much Power You Still Have 

The Problem

You just took your first practice test, and the results weren’t what you hoped.

Whatever the number was, it hurt.
Not because of the score itself, but because of what happened next.
You started questioning yourself.
Not your study plan.
Not your process.
Yourself.

We all begin from different starting points. Some examinees are managing ADHD. Some are autistic. Some are dealing with health issues, anxiety, financial stress, family obligations, or other challenges nobody else can see. Those realities matter. They shape the way we learn, the pace at which we learn, and the obstacles we may have to overcome along the way.

But those realities are not the whole story.

My grandmother used to say, “El querer es poder.“

The older I get, the less I understand that phrase as blind optimism and the more I understand it as a reminder: even when we cannot control the starting point, we still have some say in what happens next.

We cannot control our genetics. We cannot control our upbringing. We cannot control every challenge life places in front of us. We cannot control the score we received on our last practice test.

But we still have a say in what happens next.

We can decide whether a bad score becomes a verdict or information. Whether it becomes proof that we are not capable, or evidence of where the work needs to begin.

That is where will enters.

Not as fantasy. Not as denial. Not as pretending life is fair or that effort always produces immediate results.

Will is the part of us that can look at disappointment without surrendering authority over the future.

If you spend enough time studying for the bar exam, you’ll eventually reach a point where the question is no longer whether you are capable of learning the material.

The question becomes whether you are willing to remain in command of yourself while you learn it.

The Science

Educational researchers have long observed that people respond very differently to failure.

One explanation comes from attribution theory, which examines how individuals explain success and failure. Researchers have found that the explanations people create for setbacks often influence what they do next.

A disappointing outcome can be interpreted in many ways. Some people view failure as evidence of a permanent limitation. Others view it as information about effort, strategy, preparation, or circumstances that can be changed. These explanations are not trivial. They influence motivation, persistence, and future behavior.

Researchers studying self-efficacy have reached a similar conclusion. Individuals who believe their actions can influence outcomes are generally more likely to persist through setbacks, remain engaged with difficult tasks, and continue investing effort when challenges arise.

In many ways, this idea overlaps with what I mean by the will.

The will is not the ability to control every obstacle we encounter.

It is the ability to decide what happens next.

The Fix 

If the will is our capacity to exercise command over ourselves, then the solution is to practice deliberate action.

The educational literature refers to this as self-regulation. I tend to think of it more simply.

Clarity of purpose. Self-direction. Resilience. 

You can spend an entire day studying and still avoid the subject you most need to confront. You can complete ten more practice essays and still skip the review that would have taught you why you missed them. You can stay incredibly busy doing exactly what a syllabus tells you to do and still lack the agency to move yourself forward.

That is because motion without an aim is just blind persistence.

Before you can direct your effort, you need to know what you’re trying to improve.

Your purpose isn’t to study for eight hours today. Your purpose is to master hearsay exceptions. Your purpose is to identify the holes in your Civil Procedure strategy. Your purpose is to raise your score.

Once that aim is established, the will has something to direct itself toward.

Self-direction begins with honesty. Look at your data. Identify the legal concepts you’ve been avoiding and decide where your effort needs to go next.

Then act.

Build an approach that fits how your mind actually works—not the one you were told should work. If passive lectures leave you numb, abandon them. Create a map. Build a framework. Generate examples. Interact with the material until you understand it.

Resilience requires adjustment.

A poor practice score is not a reflection of your intellect. It is a data point showing you where something is breaking down.

Find the problem.
Review the rule.
Change the strategy that isn’t producing results.

That is where momentum begins.

And when those adjustments begin to compound, confidence follows. Not because you talked yourself into feeling ready, but because you created evidence.

Evidence that you can direct your efforts, adapt when necessary, and continue moving forward.

Closing Thoughts 

The law does not become memorable simply because you spend more time with it. It becomes memorable because of the way you engage with it.

Throughout this article, we’ve explored three ideas that are easy to overlook: attention, meaning, and will. 

Attention determines whether information gets through the door.
Meaning determines whether it matters enough to stay.
The will determines what happens when the process becomes difficult.

Improvement begins long before memorization, retrieval, or exam strategy ever enter the picture.

It begins in the moments before the learning itself.

The moment you become interested.
The moment you find meaning in the material.
The moment you decide to direct your effort toward understanding rather than mere completion.

Looking back, that’s what I remember most about that lecture hall at Rutgers.

Not a particular anthropological theory. Not a note I scribbled in my notebook. 

I remember the feeling in my chest that something important was about to happen.

And perhaps that’s the lesson. Before the learning began, my mind was ready to receive it.

In Part II, we’ll shift our focus from the mind to the process itself.