Readiness Was Never the Feeling They Were Chasing
Ask most reviewees when they knew they were ready for the Licensure Examination for Architects, and you’ll get a date, a mock board score, a milestone. Jave Wahing’s answer cut through that entirely. Readiness, he said, “is not a feeling, but a decision and commitment.” From the start of his review to the morning of the exam itself, he never once felt prepared — and he stopped waiting for the feeling to arrive.
Hans Gaviola arrived at the same place from a different direction. He wasn’t chasing a rank at all. His mock board scores hovered around 50%, a number that would have discouraged plenty of candidates from believing they belonged anywhere near the top ten. He kept going anyway, treating the exam as something to meet with whatever he knew on the day, rather than something he needed to feel qualified for in advance.
Neither framing is comfortable. Both are, apparently, correct.
The System Isn’t the Study Plan. It’s the Self-Audit.
What separated these two candidates from the average examinee wasn’t a superior study method — it was how precisely each built a system around their own weaknesses. Hans had already sat for the Master Plumber Licensure Exam before attempting the LEA, and that earlier exam did more than exempt him from restudying Building Utilities. It taught him how he processes information under exam conditions, and it sharpened his instinct for elimination-based reasoning — a skill that carried straight into architecture board exam Philippines-style situational questions.
Jave’s system looked nothing like the traditional Manila-paper-on-the-wall approach many reviewees default to. He rebuilt his own flashcard sets, wrote his own mnemonics for provisions he’d never encountered in actual practice, and rewrote them by hand — not once, but repeatedly — because writing, he insisted, embeds memory in a way that photographing notes never will. It’s a small claim with real backing in cognitive science, and it’s the kind of detail that separates study strategies for architects that merely look organized from ones that actually work.
Burnout Doesn’t Announce Itself. It Waits.
This is the insight that should stop anyone currently grinding through a six-month review. Jave hit a wall in his second month — two full weeks where he did nothing, recovering from a burnout he hadn’t seen coming. Hans’s came later, closer to the exam itself, and took just as long to shake off.
Jave’s read on it was blunt: “Burnout is a dangerous trap, especially for those who are reviewing.” His fix wasn’t more hours. It was fewer, more deliberate ones — a hard ceiling on study time, a mandatory rest day, and a first hour of every morning kept sacred, away from screens, spent instead on quiet and movement before the reviewing began.
Some insights are better experienced in the room.
What They Gave Up to Get There
The sacrifices, when they finally named them, weren’t dramatic. They were ordinary and specific — hangouts turned down, hours after a day job spent back at a desk, distractions deliberately made harder to reach. But it was Jave who put language to the part underneath all of that: “You need to sacrifice the older version of yourself.” Not the whole self, he clarified — just the parts that kept a person comfortable and stuck at once.
Hans’s version of the same idea arrived without the philosophy, just the standard: “If you’re not having a hard time, you’re not learning.” If the exam prep feels easy, something in the approach probably isn’t demanding enough yet.
There’s a reason neither topnotcher offered a single formula for how to pass LEA. The system Jave built and the one Hans built have almost nothing in common on paper — one leaned on flashcards and meditation, the other on a plumbing exam and a city library. What they shared was a refusal to wait for confidence before they committed to the work. And this was only part of the conversation.
Founder’s Note
What struck me most, talking to both of them, was how little they credited talent. Jave said he was an average student well into college. Hans even described himself as “bottom of the top.” Neither believed passing the exam was about natural ability—it was about showing up, putting in the work, and doing it consistently. And I think that’s the biggest takeaway from every Topnotch Talks session: the moment you stop waiting to feel ready is usually the moment real progress begins.
— Ar. Bernard Berberabe
Topnotch Talks is a conversation series by Ar. Bernard Berberabe, Founder of VIZCODE, created to capture the lessons that rarely make it into review books—how topnotchers think, study, struggle, and ultimately pass the LEA.
— VIZCODE Team
5. SNIPPET
Two LEA topnotchers, one from Davao and one from Baguio, on why they never felt ready — and what they sacrificed to pass anyway. Inside Topnotch Talks Series 4.
