Karl Avillo, MD 🚢

Over the past 10 years, I ranked 7th in the Nurse Licensure Examination, 3rd in the Physician Licensure Examination, and 1st in the Philippine Specialty Board of Internal Medicine. What most people don’t know? I use the same 3 study strategies every time. 🧵👇

Reminder to self: You have the ability to change your life in this very moment. There was never a time, and there never will be, when we are without the power to change the trajectory of our lives.

Your stress comes from knowing that you definitely need to start studying now. But instead, you're choosing to delay it just because you're waiting to "feel ready."

Brutal truth: If we don't learn from our mistakes in the practice tests, we risk making the same mistakes again when it matters the most (i.e., during the actual exam).

Reminder to self: Quitting is the only real failure. Everything else is just feedback.

It’s funny how much easier it is to stay focused when you lock yourself out of your social media accounts and other distracting apps. Because once all those distractions are gone, you’re left with nothing to do except the task that’s in front of you.

"I wasn't at 100%" is never an acceptable excuse - because no one is.

Successful people see opportunity in every failure. Normal people see failure in every opportunity. @AlexHormozi

That mental strain you feel when you're studying isn't suffering. It's the feeling of your brain actually learning and remembering something new. So, stop avoiding that mental discomfort. Instead, see it as a sign that what you're doing is actually working.

Problems usually have solutions. If something doesn't have a solution, then it's not a problem; it's just a situation. And with most situations, we don't try to solve them. We simply live with them. Because most of the time, they're out of our control. @ThisIsSethsBlog

Brutal truth: You will never outgrow your own self-limiting beliefs.

When you scroll on social media, you see everything that's wrong in the world, then your life becomes dark & unhappy But when you focus only on that 1 task that’s right in front of you, then you’ll have no time for all the bad stuff Which then makes your life bright & happy.

If you wait to start studying for your exam when you have "more" time, You'll either study less than you should, or you won't finish studying anything at all. Because the truth is, you’ll never “find” more time. So you might as well “make” the time and start studying today.

Daily reminder: The *real* waste of time is reading the study material and forgetting almost all of it. Because you never tested yourself on it.

I never get tired of reading these MedQbank success stories. Each one is a reminder that what we're doing actually matters. And nothing fires me up more than that. medqbank.com.ph

How much more progress would you make if you just turned your brain off? Just turn it off. What if you stopped thinking about the work and just DID IT instead? What if you got out of your own way? How much faster would you move? A lot. A lot faster.

Brutal truth: If you keep using the same study strategies that failed you before, Then you shouldn't be expecting a different result.

How to pass the October 2026 Physician Licensure Exam (PLE) and become a licensed MD:

Study so hard that it’d be unreasonable for you to fail the exam.

Derek Sivers said it right: “Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.”