Today’s guest LSAT blog post is by Shawdi Vara, a former Blueprint LSAT Prep student who is currently attending UC-Davis Law School.

Joe Montana, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady all have poor short term memory. Before you freak out that this is an LSAT blog post about football, let me give you an example of what I mean.

Fresh in my mind is an example from San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick in the divisional playoff game against the Green Bay Packers. On the first drive, he dropped back to pass. His first look: double covered. His second look: covered. He felt pressure, and tried to escape the pocket, but couldn’t. He then threw a terrible pass, which Green Bay intercepted and returned for a touchdown. A pick-six to start the game. Not a sign of good things to come.

Kaepernick shook off the interception, and went on to make history that night. He posted some insane stats, including the most rushing yards ever by a quarterback. He beat Aaron Rodgers in a shoot out. He was superb. He forgot that he threw the pick and (much to my delight) he crushed Green Bay, proving once and for all that California cows make better cheese.

Also see: Chargers vs. Broncos in the regular season game in which Peyton threw three interceptions in the first half and four touchdowns in the second to lead the Broncos back from a 24-point deficit to win the game. This would have been my main example, but beating the Chargers is like House M.D. figuring out the disease at the end of the show. It’s just not that exciting anymore.

What does this have to do with the LSAT? If you don’t see it by now you haven’t had a meltdown moment in your LSAT prep yet.

Imagine: you sit down to take the LSAT. You hit the first flaw question — usually your strong suit. Not this time. You spend three minutes on it. No closer to an answer. In minute four, you bubble in a blind guess. You know in your gut you got it wrong. It eats at you for. You miss the next three or four questions.

You’ve Romo’d it.

In fact, go and look at your LSATs when you finish, find that one question that bugged the hell out of you, and look at the questions that come directly after it. See if you missed any. This isn’t just in LR, it’s also in games, and RC. (Especially RC.) If you continued to do well, then you have poor short-term memory for failure, which is good. If you missed the subsequent questions, you have good short-term memory for failure, which is bad.

If you suffer from this problem, don’t worry. Here’s the way to get past it: When you come to an LSAT question that you find yourself struggling with, circle it, answer it, and move on — knowing that you’ll come back if you have time. I found that desperately trying to retrain your brain to just not think about it is futile, like trying to have Romo lead your team to a Super Bowl. If you indulge yourself by circling the question, it will allow you to actually move on, again like the Cowboys should move on from the notion that they will ever win a Super Bowl with Romo. The little voice in your head will shut up and allow you to focus on the next thing.

The better you are at letting go of the LSAT questions you get wrong, the better off your LSAT score.

Read Shawdi’s guest LSAT blog post from last week regarding law school admissions.