Trust the Process: A Lesson from a Trading Card

Recently, I decided to get back into collecting trading cards. Like many people who collected cards growing up, I remember the excitement of opening packs, discovering favorite players, and hoping to find something special.

But the hobby has changed quite a bit since I last collected. There are now countless parallels, autographs, numbered cards, and other variations that make collecting both exciting and, at times, a little overwhelming.

As I've been rediscovering the hobby, I've started collecting cards featuring athletes from a variety of sports. One of my recent acquisitions was particularly special: An autograph card featuring Anna Leigh Waters, the professional pickleball phenom who's currently ranked world No. 1 in women’s singles, doubles, and mixed doubles.

The card is serial-numbered 10/10, meaning it's the tenth of only 10 copies produced.

But what caught my attention wasn't simply the rarity of the card or the athlete featured on it.

It was the message printed on the card: TRUST THE PROCESS.

I couldn't help but smile when I saw those words.

That's something I tell my students all the time as they prepare for the bar exam.

What Does Trusting the Process Actually Mean?

Bar preparation is unlike most studying you've done in law school. You're expected to learn, retain, and apply an enormous amount of material across multiple subjects, often under significant time pressure, for one test.

And naturally, you want to see results. You want your multiple-choice scores to improve, your essays to become more organized, and your confidence to grow.

But progress isn't always immediate or consistent. You might perform well on a set of questions one day and struggle with similar questions the next. You might feel comfortable with a subject after watching lectures, only to discover that you can't recall the rules when writing an essay without notes.

That's where trusting the process becomes important.

Trusting the process means committing to a structured plan of preparation even when you don't immediately see the results you want.

Your commercial bar review course wasn't assembled randomly. Its schedule, assignments, practice questions, and assessments are designed to build the knowledge and skills you'll need on exam day. The same is true of the guidance you receive from your law school's bar preparation professor.

So when your bar review course tells you to complete practice questions, write essays, review explanations, or revisit previously studied material, there's a reason.

And when your bar prep professor (someone like me!) encourages you to practice active recall, analyze your mistakes, complete timed exercises, or spend more time on a particular weakness, there's a reason for that, too.

Trust the people and resources that are helping you prepare.

That means following your bar review course's schedule, completing the assigned work, and taking feedback seriously. It also means resisting the temptation to constantly reinvent your study plan because you heard that someone else is doing something different.

Of course, trusting the process doesn't mean blindly following a schedule when something clearly isn't working. A good preparation plan allows for adjustments based on your performance. But those adjustments should be deliberate and informed by evidence, not driven by panic after one disappointing practice score.

The Work You Don't See

There's another reason the "TRUST THE PROCESS" message on Anna Leigh Waters's card resonates with me.

When we watch elite athletes compete (and, yes, pickleballers are elite athletes!), we see the finished product. We see the remarkable shots, the victories, the trophies, and the celebrations.

What we don't see are all the hours of practice that made those moments possible. We don't see every missed shot, every frustrating training session, or every adjustment made along the way.

The same is true of the bar exam.

When you see someone celebrating a passing result, you see the outcome. You don't necessarily see the countless hours spent preparing for that moment.

You don't see the practice questions they got wrong, the essays they struggled to finish, or the moments when they questioned whether they were making enough progress.

And that's worth remembering when you're in the middle of your own preparation. The work you're doing today may not produce an immediately visible result. But that doesn't mean it isn't contributing to your eventual success

Stay the course. Trust the process.