When Life Feels Like a 25-Minute, 100-Question Exam You Didn’t Study For

We’ve all been there: you open the test booklet, the clock starts, and suddenly question #1 looks like it’s written in ancient Sumerian. Your brain freezes. Do you grind through it right now, hoping the mental wrestling match eventually pays off? Or do you put a little star next to it, flip the page, and pray the next ones feel more like your native language?

That split-second choice is basically the same one life keeps throwing at us every single day.

The exam metaphor hits because time really does feel brutally short. You get roughly the same 24 hours everyone else does, but 100 “questions” still show up: Should I switch careers? Is this relationship worth another year? Do I invest the extra money or pay down debt? Should I finally have that hard conversation with my parents/sibling/friend? Move to a new city? Start the side hustle? Have kids? Not have kids? The list is endless, and none of them come with an answer key.

Here’s the thing most people (myself included) learn the hard way: sinking twenty minutes into one impossible question almost always costs you way more than it gains.

When you’re stuck staring at the mystery question, two bad things usually happen at once:

1. The clock keeps ticking while you produce zero progress.
2. Your confidence takes a nosedive, which makes the next ten questions feel harder than they actually are.

It’s the emotional version of compound interest—except it compounds negatively.

Skipping, on the other hand, feels like cheating at first… until you realize it’s strategy.

You jump to the next question → you get it right → dopamine hit → momentum builds → suddenly you’re cruising through questions 15–40 like it’s nothing. When you circle back to the monster from question #3, two magical things have usually happened:

• You’ve picked up speed and confidence.
• Sometimes the original question doesn’t look quite so terrifying anymore because your brain has been warmed up on easier wins.

Life works the exact same way.

That career crossroads you can’t solve today? Park it. Go get a small win somewhere else, finish a project, ask for the raise, learn one new skill, go on one date, apply to one apartment. Each little completed “question” loosens the knot in your chest. Very often, the thing that felt unsolvable quietly becomes solvable while you weren’t looking directly at it.

Of course, there’s a caveat.

You can’t skip every question forever. Some monsters have to be faced eventually: health scares, ending a marriage, burying a parent, coming out, getting sober, admitting you’re broke. Those are the ones you’ll have to sit with until the timer is almost up.

But even then, the people who handle those brutal questions best are usually the ones who didn’t spend the first 20 minutes of the exam paralyzed on question #1. They banked confidence and clarity on the solvable stuff first.

So yeah… skip early, skip often, but don’t skip forever.

Start the hard ones, rack up the points you can get, let momentum do some of the heavy lifting, and trust that when you finally return to the beast, you’ll be a slightly different, and usually stronger version of yourself.

The clock doesn’t care how noble your struggle looks. It only cares what you actually finish.

What’s the one question you’ve been staring at way too long already? Maybe today’s the day you just draw a little star next to it… and turn the page.