Getting through JEE

Even though it is more than 10 years since I wrote JEE, even today i get questions like "how do you prepare for JEE", "give me some tips/guidance for effective study" etc. Since it is such a long time i no longer remember the main things that i did/strategies that i used to prepare etc. So I have to resort to generic bullshit like:

1. Work systematically to cover everything
2. Write a lot of state/country level tests
   
3. Do what you like, don't try to get through JEE and into engineering just bcos there is peer pressure.
4. Plan well, experiment and find out what works best for you etc etc

If someone had asked me the same question when i was studying, i would probably have had a million specific things that i used for preparing. Once you are through you usually forget what actually contributed to that and start resorting to obvious things like the above...

If I had a (b)log of what all i did back then, I am sure it would have been valuable now. If we had similar logs for say the top 100 ppl in their respective fields (say ppl who start startups, ppl who had significant social impact, ppl who invent things...) I wonder what we will learn from their logs rather than from listening to what they have to say about how they did it.