Post No. 500: The Journey to the 500 Club
500 blog posts!
It’s a milestone I never imagined reaching when I started ProfessorTommy.Tips (originally called DeanTommy.tips) back on July 24, 2015, with a short blog post titled "The Story Behind the Crazy Pants." In that post, I explained why, on bar exam days, I wear outrageously colored, patterned Loudmouth Golf pants—not for style, not for attention, but for my students.
Back then, my goal was simple: help bar examinees break the tension on exam morning. The stress is real, the stakes are high, and often, a simple laugh, smile, or distraction before walking into the test room can make all the difference. That’s what the pants were for—one small way to remind my students to take a breath, reset, and walk in with confidence.
Fast forward 10 years—and 500 blog posts later—and the mission remains the same: to make bar prep engaging, effective, and just a little bit more fun. But in hitting this milestone, I’ve also been reflecting on what it really means to reach 500 of anything—whether it’s blog posts 500 career wins in sports or 500 miles on the racetrack. The truth is, no one accidentally stumbles into the 500 Club—whether in sports, business, music, or law, it happens through consistency, discipline, and pushing forward, even on the hard days.
So, for this 500th post, I want to explore what it means to join the 500 Club—in sports, business, and pop culture—and what law students and bar exam taker can learn from it.
The 500-Club Across Fields: Who’s in It?
🏀 The 500 Wins Club
Legendary coaches like Mike Krzyzewski (Duke, 1,202 wins) and Gregg Popovich (San Antonio Spurs, 1,388 wins ... and counting) all passed the 500-win mark through decades of preparation, adjustments, and discipline. They didn’t win every game, but they built systems, studied past performances, and refined their strategies over time.
💡 Bar Prep Lesson: Treat your study plan like a coach builds a winning team—you need a structured game plan. That means:
Stick to a strategy. Don’t wing it. Develop a detailed study plan that accounts for daily and weekly goals, prioritizing weak areas while maintaining proficiency in strong subjects. Have a study schedule that includes practice essays, MBE sets, and targeted review sessions.
Make adjustments. Track your progress and be honest about what’s working and what’s not. If your essay structure is weak, dedicate time to practicing IRAC. If you struggle with multiple-choice questions, focus on refining your approach to answer elimination. Adjust your approach rather than repeating ineffective methods.
Trust the process. Understand that improvement takes time. Growth may be slow at first, but daily practice and persistence will lead to measurable progress. Set milestones and recognize small victories along the way to keep motivated. Your bar prep progress might feel slow at first, but steady effort compounds into success.
⚾️ The 500 Home Run Club
Only 28 players in Major League Baseball history have hit 500 career home runs. No one reaches 500 home runs in a single season—it takes years of consistently showing up, training, and improving, even when they aren’t seeing immediate results.
💡 Bar Prep Lesson: Think of every MBE question and practice essay as a swing of the bat. Some will be home runs, some will be strikeouts. But the only way to get better is to keep swinging.
Don’t get discouraged by bad practice scores. Even the best sluggers go through slumps. One bad quiz doesn’t mean you’re doomed. Take time to review why you got an answer wrong, identify patterns in your mistakes, and adjust your approach. Mistakes are learning opportunities, not signs of failure.
Engage in active learning. Instead of passively reading outlines, challenge yourself with practice questions, teach concepts to others, and use spaced repetition techniques. The more actively engaged you are, the more efficiently you will retain the material and improve your analytical skills. Try summarizing rules in your own words, explaining concepts to a friend, or writing out your reasoning before looking at the answer choices.
📈 The Fortune 500 List
The Fortune 500 lists the most successful companies in the world, but none of them started at the top. Amazon was just a small online bookstore in 1994. Apple was nearly bankrupt in the late ‘90s. Nike struggled with cash flow issues for years before becoming a global brand.
💡 Bar Prep Lesson: Your bar exam success is like building a business—it grows through daily, consistent investment.
You won’t “feel ready” overnight. The best students understand that learning builds slowly over time. Amazon didn’t become a trillion-dollar company in a day, and you won’t master Constitutional Law in a week. Break down your study into manageable pieces and set weekly goals to track progress. Keep a study journal to reflect on what you’ve learned and where you need improvement.
Keep investing in your skills. Every essay you write and every MBE question you review is like a company reinvesting in growth. Even when progress feels slow, trust the process. Spend time reviewing wrong answers and rewriting essays to internalize feedback. Allocate time for skill-building exercises like issue spotting drills and time-management strategies to improve efficiency on exam day.
🎸 The 500 Best Lists
The best songs didn’t come from one-hit wonders—they came from artists who put in years of practice, writing, and refining their craft. Taylor Swift wrote hundreds of songs before she had her first big break with Fearless and Speak Now. Similarly, landing on the Billboard 500 charts isn’t about luck. It’s about consistent effort and honing one's musical abilities over time.
💡 Bar Prep Lesson: Bar exam writing, like songwriting, improves through iteration.
Your first essay won’t be perfect. That’s okay. Keep refining. Keep practicing. Every essay is a chance to sharpen your analysis, structure, and timing. Track your improvement by reviewing past essays and noting recurring mistakes, then make it a goal to eliminate them one by one.
Review your greatest hits. Keep track of your best rule statements and issue-spotting strategies and use them as templates. If you identify a well-written, concise rule statement, store it in a dedicated document for quick reference and repetition. Build a personal repository of well-structured essays so that you can review them before the exam for reinforcement.
Don’t chase shortcuts. The best songs (and best essays) come from real preparation, not cramming. Avoid the temptation of relying solely on model answers. Instead, write out full essays under timed conditions and focus on self-assessment—compare your answer to a model, identify weaknesses, and rewrite problem areas to reinforce proper structure and legal reasoning.
🏁 500-Mile Races
The Indy 500 is a grueling 500-mile test of skill, endurance, and strategy. Drivers don’t just floor the gas pedal—they pace themselves, manage pit stops, and adapt their strategy throughout the race.
💡 Bar Prep Lesson: The bar exam is an endurance event, not a sprint. To perform at your best, you need to build stamina and resilience over time, just like a marathon runner or an Indy 500 driver preparing for race day.
Don’t burn out early. Set realistic daily study goals and incorporate rest days. Overloading yourself will lead to diminishing returns, so balance hard work with strategic recovery. Think of your study schedule like a training program—alternate intense study sessions with lighter review days to maintain mental energy and avoid burnout before exam day.
Simulate the real thing. Take full-length practice exams to build mental endurance. Schedule at least two or three full-length practice exams under realistic conditions during your bar preparation, including time constraints and minimal breaks. This will help you adjust to the pacing of the test and condition yourself for the long days of the exam.
Use “pit stops” wisely. Plan scheduled breaks—you can’t run at full speed for two months straight. Short, intentional breaks can actually improve retention and focus. Use the Pomodoro technique or take structured breaks after completing a full essay or MBE set. Walk around, hydrate, and refresh your mind before diving back in.
The 500 Club
Before we wrap up, let’s take a moment to reflect on what these milestones truly signify—commitment, persistence, and the ability to push through challenges, even when progress feels slow. For me, writing 500 blog posts has been a journey of consistency, discipline, and showing up even on the days I didn’t feel like it.
Bar prep is the same.
Keep swinging. Keep building. Keep grinding.
