I remember people telling me that lawyers are never as smart as they are on the last day of the bar exam. After the last performance test, many of the subjects tested on the bar exam unrelated to one’s future practice area become nothing more than faint memories. We become very focused on our specialties and forget just how much we used to know about other subjects, and not just those covered in law school. Sometimes all you need is a Point One break- 0.1 hour or 6 minutes off from the billable hour to test your smarts.
Enter Sporcle, the online trivia website. Although not as exciting as trivia night at your local bar^, it’s a great way to see just how much you remember about long forgotten subjects like famous art, geography or world history. My favorite are the minute morsel quizzes, which are 1 minute quizzes that test your knowledge of things like country names that include a given set of three letters. Sporcle is a convenient way to take a billable break without leaving your office plus challenge your smarts in a non-law related way. As Sir Francis Bacon said: ipsa scientia potestas est- knowledge itself is power.
^ Side Note: If you haven’t done trivia night at your local bar, add this to your livables list of things to do. Fair warning, if you do decide to partake in Tuesday Trivia at Rose & Crown in Palo Alto, get ready to compete against some seriously brilliant minds as this bar tends to draw in the Stanford PhD and graduate student crowd.