In the past couple of weeks, I've had dozens of students tell me that they "aren't ready" to start doing practice problems.
If you haven't started doing practice problems, YOU MUST START NOW!
The thing is, when exactly are you going to feel ready? The day before the exam?
Ask yourself, have you ever actually felt "ready" for anything that was really important to you? If I had had much of a choice to when I was "ready" to take the SAT, the LSAT, the Bar (actually, I was ready for that one, because I was so sick of it); when to turn in a short story to go to the Iowa Writers' Workshop; when to walk up and say "hi" to a woman I thought was really pretty; when to get married to that same woman; when to get a mortgage; when to get puppies; when to have children; when to appear in court; when to write law books; when to play with my band on the radio; when to teach a class; etc., etc., so on and so forth, there's a good chance I'd currently be unmarried, unemployed, and living under a bridge.
Most of us are never really going to feel perfectly "ready" for whatever big thing is coming down the pike.
For law school exams, it's pretty easy to hide behind making outlines and reading notes. There's nothing at stake. Until you actually test yourself, you can believe you know enough to get by. It's a safe feeling. It's frightening to suddenly find out, "Holy smokes! I have no idea how proximate cause works!"
However, you need to test yourself before your actual exams, or you're going to be finding out what you don't know when you get your grades. You need to tell yourself, "I have to get ready for this. I can get ready for this. I am strong enough to discover what I don't know and I can fix it now."
Listen to this song, and tell yourself, "I'm not scared of anything! I am a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm!"
Iggy and the Stooges, "Search and Destroy"
(Alex Ruskell)
