I wasn’t good at the LSAT, then I was.

The long version:

I started the way most people do — a little research and a lot of confidence. The internet promised a better score in just three months. I bought the books, did the exercises, took the practice tests, and worked with discipline and determination. For a while it worked and my score climbed.

And then it just… stopped.

But I don’t give up easy. I redoubled my effort and spent six more months working at it even harder. And yet, my score still didn't budge. I stepped away from the test entirely — to think about it, and honestly, about myself. It seemed like I'd given it everything I had, and my best was simply far less than I ever imagined. For a long time, that felt like the only explanation. But I simply couldn’t accept it, and that led me to a second explanation: I was just going about it wrong.

Everything in my academic life had taught me the same lesson — work hard, do the assignments, study for the exam, and you'll excel. So that's how I'd attacked the LSAT. Work hard, do the curriculum, take the practice tests, and you’ll score 170+. But I'd been trying to build a house by rubbing two sticks together. It didn’t matter how hard I worked if it was the wrong work.

That realization slowly grew into a methodology. I started insisting on a specific, tangible connection between the work I was doing and the improvement it was supposed to produce. That meant getting brutally precise about what was actually wrong — not "I'm bad at RC," but solving for exactly why. Some days, I spent more time trying to crack a single misunderstanding than I spent on working new problems. It was slow work, but it was the right work and it was effective. It pushed my fundamentals to levels I didn't know existed. And it revealed huge blind spots in tactics and strategy which were entire dimensions of the test I’d never understood how to study. Those discoveries were the beginnings of the systems I teach today.

As I taught myself how to develop these new, targeted skills, my score started moving again. And this time it didn’t stop. When test day rolled around, I was averaging a 176 on my practice tests, and that’s what I scored on my official test.