He thought of the Reddit thread again, not the one with the easy answers but the one that nudged people toward practice. Somewhere a different user still hunted for a cheat, eyes bright with hungry impatience. Eli wished they’d find the same quiet advice he had: there are no shortcuts that leave you standing where you want to be. You could borrow an answer for a score, but you couldn’t borrow the skill.
Eli printed a practice sheet, the ink smudging slightly as if embarrassed to be made permanent. He taped it to his wall, across from the small whiteboard where he sketched interview questions. Each night before bed he spent twenty minutes on puzzles, noting the patterns that tripped him—rotations that fooled him into symmetry, extra elements that mimicked subtraction. His scores crept up, then leapt. He stopped craving shortcuts. He liked the way a problem yielded at last, the small click when an operation made sense.
Near the bottom, a comment had gone viral. A student shared a tape-recorded confession: “I used the answers once. I got the job. After three months I realised I couldn’t fake the thinking in meetings. I left. It felt hollow.” A string of replies—thank yous, empathy—turned the post into something like a small public therapy session.
The thread changed shape overnight. The sensational title still drew clicks, but the conversation drifted. Where answers had promised easy passage, the community began to trade strategies for learning: how to estimate time per question, how to manage anxiety, and how to disassemble a matrix into bite-sized operations. A moderator posted a short note: “We’re removing solution dumps. Value comes from learning.”
A week later he opened an email with the subject line: Assessment Results. His stomach tensed. He read: “Strong abstract reasoning—recommended for next stage.” He smiled but didn’t leap. The result was a marker, not a promise.
He clicked reply. His fingers hovered, then typed: “I’m starting fresh. Any recommended drills?” Replies came promptly: pattern worksheets, links to free abstract-reasoning practice, a friendly bot suggesting daily twenty-minute sessions. A user offered a simple exercise: pick a sheet, time yourself, then write what operation you used for each answer. Another suggested alternating speed practice with slow, careful reviews.
On the morning of his test, Eli read the instructions twice, then four times—calm, methodical. In the test room, the clock still ticked louder than it should. He breathed, scanned, and began. Questions dissolved one by one: recognize the rule, test it, choose the option that fit. When doubt came, he eliminated the impossible and trusted the pattern.