Ready to Get Your CISSP? Here's How I Passed in 105 Questions

The traffic classroom

If you commute in any big city, nobody needs to explain rush-hour traffic to you. You just need me to say the word “traffic,” and you’ll feel it in your blood pressure. I used to lose it—two hours a day, gone, staring at brake lights.

Then I decided to stop fighting it. I fired up Pete Zerger’s CISSP course on YouTube and turned my car into a lecture hall. And when I say course, I mean one enormous, marathon-length video—not bite-sized clips. Which honestly worked better for the commute: play it on the way to work, pause when I park, resume on the way home. My daily traffic became a progress bar creeping through Zerger, one drive at a time.

I paired the video with his book, The Last Mile CISSP. Listen in the car, read it at night. The same concepts hitting me twice in one day from two different angles—that’s when things started to actually stick instead of sliding right off.

I’m not going to pretend the first pass was smooth. Half the time, I’d arrive at work remembering that Zerger talked about something important, but I had no idea what it was,but familiarity does a lot of quiet work. By the time I sat down to really study, nothing felt alien anymore.

The part that actually changed everything

Here’s the thing nobody tells you loudly enough: the CISSP isn’t just a technical exam. It’s a risk-and-management exam that wears a security costume.

I kept failing practice questions early on, and it wasn’t because I didn’t know the material. It was because I kept answering like an engineer. The question says, “The server has a critical vulnerability,” and my brain goes, “Patch it now!” Wrong. The exam wanted: “Assess the risk, understand the business impact, advise management.” Completely different instinct.

That’s where Luke Ahmed came in. His stuff on thinking like a manager—how to approach questions from the mindset of a risk advisor instead of a hands-on-keyboard fixer—was the switch that flipped for me. A few rules got burned into my head:

• Human life comes first
• You advise; management decides
• Assess before you act, every single time

Once I started reading every question as, “What would a calm, experienced manager recommend?”, my practice scores jumped. Not a little. It was embarrassing how much I’d been fighting myself.

Maps, notebooks, and other old-fashioned things

Two habits did most of the heavy lifting after that.

First, Rob Witcher’s CISSP MindMap series. The CISSP has eight domains, and they leak into each other constantly—a “cryptography” question might really be testing governance. The mind maps gave me a visual skeleton of how everything connects, so I could pause on any question and ask, “Wait, which domain is this really about?” Those episodes were great in the car too. Zerger in the morning, Witcher in the evening—my commute had a syllabus.

Second, and this one sounds almost silly in 2026: I wrote things down. By hand. Actual notebooks, actual pen. After a study session, I’d close everything and write down what I remembered, in my own words. Then I’d check what I missed. The gaps told me exactly what to study the next day.

There’s some science behind handwriting helping memory, but honestly, I didn’t do it for the science. I did it because typing lets you half-sleep, and handwriting doesn’t. If my hand was moving, my brain was awake.

Simulating the real thing

Knowledge got me ready. Simulation got me to 105.

The actual exam is adaptive, and it’s long—up to 150 questions in three hours—and every question feels harder than the last. The first time you meet that pressure cold, it eats you alive. So I didn’t meet it cold.

I used Quantum Exams’ simulations, always timed, always treated like the real thing. No phone, no pauses, no snacks. What I was really training wasn’t knowledge—it was pacing (about a minute per question, no spiraling), tolerance for ambiguity (half the questions have two decent answers, and you have to pick the best one), and the mindset switch. Before every simulation, I’d deliberately tell myself: You’re a manager now, not an engineer. By exam day, that voice was automatic.

I’ll be honest—my first few simulations were rough. Timing was a mess, and I’d freeze on questions that had no clearly “right” answer, because the real exam doesn’t give you those. But that’s the point. Better to fall apart on a simulation than at Pearson VUE.

Exam Day

I walked into the test center weirdly calm. Not confident, exactly—more like, "I have done this exact thing twenty times already"

The questions came. I applied the mindset, at 105 it's stopped suddenly 👀

If I had to compress all of this

Zerger’s marathon video and book built the foundation. Witcher’s mind maps gave it structure. Luke Ahmed gave me the mindset the exam is actually testing. Handwriting made it stick. Quantum Exams made it exam-proof.

None of that worked alone. All of it together—plus a commute I’d stopped resenting—got me a pass five questions past the minimum.

So if you’re preparing right now: don’t collect resources. Build a system. Get the manager mindset early, not at the end. Do the timed simulations until the pressure feels boring. And if you’re stuck in traffic every day, don’t fight it.