Crafting Cases

Good question, and one of the most common we get in the comments of our Youtube channel.

They don't really care about mental math per se.

What they care about is "numerical comfort": how comfortable you are working with numbers.

Doing simple math quickly, without showing effort, without making mistakes, and, ideally, without needing paper is a proxy they use to see how comfortable you are with numbers.

Think about it…

Which person is more comfortable with numbers?

PERSON 1: Automatically picks up their phone (or a piece of paper) when asked what is 78 + 81.

PERSON 2: Quickly gives an (approximate) answer when asked what is 1,102 / 12%.

If you had taken Bulletproof Mental Math, you'd answer 8,816 immediately to the second question because you'd have internalized that dividing by 12% means (roughly) multiplying by 8, and you'd be able to easily multiply 1,102 by 8 by doing math from left to right.

You'd do that before the other person could even unlock their phone. And you'd also know the result is slightly imprecise and that to get to the precise result all you needed to do was to sum ⅓ of 1,102 to the result.

This is numerical comfort. And your interviewer wants to see that.

Being able to quickly and effortlessly do mental math is akin to being able to work on a spreadsheet using only keyboard commands.

On the surface, it doesn't matter much because the person who reaches for the mouse all the time can create the same model as you. But in practice, it makes a big difference.

The whole course has 3h45m of core content (which includes video lessons and mini-exercises within the lessons) and worksheets to help you internalize the techniques.

Our estimated time for you to complete the worksheets is 45 minutes in total.

So you can complete the whole course in 4h30m, including doing the worksheets.

In case you have a bit more difficulty with the worksheets, there are video solutions of all worksheets, that amount to about 2 hours of extra video. These are optional and only necessary if the techniques from a specific module are especially difficult for you to apply.

So at the top of the range, you'll spend 6-7 hours doing everything.

This is by design.

We wanted the course to take you to a Top 5% level of mental math in just a few days.

Of course, you can take the course at a slower pace if you have more time than that – by this point, it's your choice.

Depending on your schedule, you may not be able to go through the whole course (unless you spend 2-3 hours per day on it), but even if you do ~50% of it, you'll be way more fluent in doing math.

I don't know about you, but I'm not a completionist… If I can do 50% of something and that something helps me achieve my goals, that's good enough.

That said, be sure that whatever you do in these two days is the critical thing you should work on.

If you know with good certainty that computations / mental math is the thing that'll help you the most in these interviews, I don't see anything that'll help you more than this course.

If, however, you think other things such as creating frameworks / structuring equations / estimations is more important, I wouldn't join this course for now and focus on those other things instead.

If you're the type of person who sees it as realistic to get an interview with a consulting firm, you can learn to do fast, error-free math without using paper.

In fact, I've once had a coaching client who had trouble with arithmetic since 5th grade, and I was able to solve her problems overnight by teaching her just two techniques – techniques you'll find in this course.

The truth is, these techniques could be taught to 7th graders and they'd be able to easily do consulting-level mental math. Unfortunately, school prioritizes other things like sin/cos functions, but that's a topic for another day…

The point is: the techniques are simple and effective. With a little bit of practice (which you'll also find in this course), 99.9% of the people who get a consulting interview are able to internalize them in under a week and completely change the way they solve quick math problems.

No.

This course focuses almost exclusively on doing computations fast, effortlessly and without making mistakes.

You can use these techniques either on paper or using just your mind.

If you're having trouble with structuring the equations, a step prior to computing the numbers, we have two other courses that are focused on that.

Master Market Sizing is our course focused on Estimation problems. It teaches you how to structure, create assumptions and reality-check your estimations (market sizing problems, for example).

Analytics Academy is our course focused on Quantitative Analysis and Chart Interpretation problems. It teaches you how to structure analyses when you already have the data (so it's not an estimation), and how to interpret the results of analyses or charts to move the case forward.

These two courses are longer than Bulletproof Mental Math because the skill of structuring these types of problems is more complex and take more time to learn.

They're important, though, because if you can't structure your estimations or analyses, it doesn't matter how fast you can compute numbers.

Which course is for you merely depends on what skill you want to get better / which skill you struggle the most with right now.

Even if you use pen and paper to solve all your math problems in your interviews, your interviewer's still looking at how you solve them.

They want you to solve math problems in a way that's efficient, easy to communicate and easy to avoid (or catch) mistakes.

Aka: all the techniques taught in this course.

The techniques in this course work for both pen and paper math and mental math.

It just so happens that, once you learn them, mental math becomes as easy as pen and paper math, so you won't even bother using paper most times.

That said, you still need some competency in mental math for when these two scenarios eventually happen:

1) You get a math problem so easy your interviewer would cringe if you had to reach for pen and paper (e.g.: "82 + 150"; "60 * 11%"; "1,152 / 2").

2) Your interviewer (usually a partner) explicitly asks for you to run a set of calculations in your head, out loud and without using paper.

The first scenario will happen several times per interview, because most interviews have a ton of computations, many of them very simple. If you have to use paper to do all of them, your interviewer may see you as numerically challenged.

So it pays to do at least some of the computations mentally on your interviews.

The second scenario is rarer, and will likely only happen in final rounds.

But it has happened to me and to several people I know.

And believe me, you don't want to be stuck on a final round unable to do this.

In the grand scheme of things, arithmetic skills are less important than others such as problem structuring and structuring math problems.

The reason why we emphasize this so much in other courses is that a lot of beginner candidates spend as much time on mental math as on those other, more important skills.

Now, the truth is that if you can't solve the key skills well, being fast on mental math is pretty much useless. You won't even get to the point of calculating numbers.

That said, being able to do bulletproof mental math is pretty useful – your case will flow better, your interviewer will be more impressed and you'll be more confident you won't make a dumb mistake that derails your case.

It's just down on the priority list compared to those other skills (which are the 6 Building Blocks we teach in Case Interview Fundamentals).

This is the primary reason why we designed this course to be FAST.

It's useful to learn it, but only if you don't spend weeks / months to do so. You've gotta learn it quickly for the ROI to be positive.

Otherwise, it's better to spend all this time on the more fundamentals skills.

Of course you could.

And it'd probably help you.

There's only two problems:

1) They tend to spend a lot of time on irrelevant things (for case interviews), like vedic math, how to quickly multiply 8-digit numbers and party tricks.

2) They don't have enough practice, especially practiced focused on the types of numbers you'll see in cases.

All in all, these are books written by and for math enthusiasts who get excited about, well, solving math riddles.

It's cool reading for the summer if you're that kind of person, but it's an inefficient way to upskill for your case interviews.

We've created this course because a lot of people want to learn this specifically for passing interviews as quickly as possible.

If that's you, this course is a better fit.

The price difference is small too, and here you'll get exactly what you need.

So, these are the pros and cons of each. In the end, it's your call of course.

We've used them all and didn't find a mental math course / resource that:

1) Has the right problems, the right techniques and the right practice intertwined to teach exactly what you need.

2) Is focused on helping you be able to effortless, fast and error-free as quickly as possible.

We wanted you to have that, thus we've built this course.

If you've ever used any other of our resources and liked it, this one won't disappoint you.