The Test Is the Milestone.

If your goal is to pass the test, do not buy a Worthy Rival program.

Tests exist because they provide a method of measuring a standard. They measure retained information. They measure task performance. Tests try to seduce you into believing they are the objective. You know when a test will happen. You know the test will be scored. You know that score determines whether you passed or failed.

Tests are inherently finite. The moment we mistake the measurement for the objective is the moment our reason to prepare disappears after we pass the test. How often have you found yourself no longer training or studying because there is no test—or because you’ve already passed it?

You were prepared for a moment in time.

Following this rationale, the simple solution is to eliminate all tests, right? Our egos wouldn’t take the hit of a failed test, and we’d be significantly less stressed. But tests aren’t the enemy of preparedness; they are the complement to it.

The test is a milestone—historically and figuratively. A milestone marks a location along a path, not the end of it. The test does the same: it tells you where you are at a particular point in time and gives you a measure of your progress in an endless pursuit. In that sense, the test reveals preparation, and it is preparation that the test should encourage. But preparedness doesn’t give us a tidy finish line, so we end up back where we started: plotting a course to pass a test.

But what if we don’t pass the test? Is that the end? Does that mean you’re a failure? Of course not. Perhaps you prepared the wrong way, prepared for the wrong test, didn’t spend enough time preparing, or prepared for the wrong reasons. One thing is certain: it is not the test’s fault. The result gives us something to confront.

What did the failure reveal?

The same thing that passing the test does. Performance reveals preparation; it does not define a person. Failure should challenge you to ask, “Where did my preparation fall short?” while recognizing that even within failure there can be smaller accomplishments upon which to build. Falling short doesn’t mean the path has ended. It tells you there is farther to go.

Passing, too, reveals preparation. It shows that your preparation was sufficient to meet the standard at that moment in time. We can celebrate the accomplishment while guarding against treating it as a reason to stop preparing. Instead, passing should inspire us to ask, “What am I preparing for next?”

Pass or fail, the test has done its job. What happens next is up to you.

The test is the milestone. Preparedness is the goal.

If I’m asking you to reconsider why you prepare, Worthy Rival should be held to the same standard in why it exists.

Worthy Rival doesn’t exist to sell programs to help people pass tests.

Worthy Rival exists to help you prepare for what life requires.

So if, at the end of a Worthy Rival program, you only trained to pass a test, Worthy Rival failed to make clear why preparation should be the goal.

Tests have finish lines.

Programs have finish lines.

Academies have finish lines.

Careers have finish lines.

Races have finish lines.

Preparedness is attached to living, not any one of those things. Life continues to make demands until it doesn’t.

In life there is only one true finish line.