The best way to be a great law student is to be great at not being a law student. Being great at life in general does not mean you should compete as fiercely in everything as you do with law, to be the best, to learn the most. But there is a baseline of energy anybody can express on a given day. Like exercising, when you express more energy than your system can bear, you will be for the day exhausted, but in the long run, strengthened. That extra vigor from exercise is good for more than just more exercise. Keeping a healthy routine will boost your amount of red blood cells, your metabolism, your immune system. Your body is used to having to do extra exertions, and so is always ready too. You have lifted up your baseline so that when you have to push extra, you can.

Well, studying in law school pushes you above your baseline. But to have a buffered system, to be able to absorb the shocks of taking your exams and such, you need a system that is overall balanced and able to absorb traumas and exasperations. In other words, you need to be balanced.

This does not mean you need an exacting diet or a difficult exercise regime or the perfect girlfriend or boyfriend and the best sex life. But having all those bases adequately covered, having your general needs met gives you an integrated system that will balance you out when you need to stretch. Having emotional support from family, friends, and significant others, having secure money, a good diet, an exercised body, does more than make you a balanced person, but it allows you to safely become very unbalanced, to study harder, to stretch farther.

Therefore, it is rightly said that to be the best law student, to be the best lawyer, you must be more than a lawyer, you must be a good human being. There is more to life than making a living after all; there is the totality, there is how it all fits together. Having that ultimate balance is necessary to stabilize you when you have tragedies and traumas on and off the career. Law isn't everything. Realizing that will make you not worse, but better at law.