When facing a challenge you may get overwhelmed. How am I going to spend the next three (or four) years of my life studying in law school? How the hell am I going to run 26.2 miles? Remember you didn’t set out on your journey looking for easy. Take it one step at a time, one foot in front of the other. One mile at a time. One class at a time. In Anne Lamont’s book, Bird by Bird, she describes how her son was feeling overwhelmed by a paper he had to write on birds. How am I going to complete the assignment, he lamented to his mother? Anne advised him: “one bird at a time.”
When training for a marathon, you don’t go out and try to run 26.2 miles on your first day of training. You break it down, and slowly increase your mileage each week. It doesn’t happen overnight. You break it down into several months. Facing a run of 3 miles is more manageable the first day then 26.2. In fact, you usually never run the whole 26.2 miles in training. You may only run up to 20 miles.
In law school, take it one day at a time. While your legal career begins in law school, you can’t learn everything in one day or even one year. Focus on one subject at a time, not all of them. For example, when preparing for exams in law school, you don’t study for all of them at the same time. You focus on one exam at a time. When studying for the bar exam, you don’t study for all the subjects on the bar at the same time at the outset. Instead your bar review course will focus on one subject at a time. Even when reviewing one subject, like torts, you focus on one type of tort at a time, such as intentional torts. Then focus on one legal issue at a time.
When you feel overwhelmed try not to focus on the huge task in front of you as a whole but instead focus on one piece of it. “Chunking” is a technique where you break down something into smaller pieces. Whether it be an assignment, presentation, paper or race, take it one step at a time.