Passed @ 100 Questions
Passed the CISSP today. Great feeling, honestly.
This community helped me shake off a lot of the nerves while I was preparing, so I want to give back…even if this mostly echoes what’s already been posted here.
Quick background:
I have about nine years in security, across security operations, cloud & application security, and most recently leading security governance out of a CISO’s office. My cert stack is mostly technical: Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer, Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect Expert and Azure Security Engineer on the cloud side, plus CySA+ and SecurityX (formerly CASP+) from CompTIA. I also picked up CC back when ISC2 was handing it out for free.
So going in, I knew I had the knowledge.
What I didn’t have was the ISC2 test-taking mindset.
Here’s the thing about this exam: You HAVE to read the question thoroughly and use deductive reasoning to find the best answer, not the correct answer. Multiple options will be technically right. Only one is right for the role they’re testing you in.
About 30 questions in, I knew I was going to pass. Not because I’d memorized acronyms, port numbers, or every encryption algorithm, the exam doesn’t care. It’s evaluating how you think as a security leader, not a security technician. You’re the one making the decision, not executing it. Once that clicked, the rest of the exam got a lot easier to navigate.
Resources I used:
FREE
Destination Certification mind maps and videos
Andrew Ramdayal’s 50 CISSP questions
Pete Zerger’s exam cram series
Daily Debian 100 CISSP Questions
PAID
CISSP Practice Exams 2026: 750 CAT Scenario Questions by Manoj Sharma on Udemy (I don’t think I spent more than $15.)
Main reason I invested in the Udemy practice questions wasn’t the content itself, but to gauge the difficulty level of the questions and build stamina to sit through potentially 150 questions in a three hour session. With that being said i don’t think this was essential to me passing, but it did help reinforce my knowledge in preparation to pass.
LAST BUT NOT LEAST.. My good Friend AI (Allen Iverson 🏀)also known as Claude (DM me if you want my artifacts)
Study time: roughly two to three hours a day for about six weeks. I broke it into phases:
1 Baseline. Took 2 practice exams cold to see where I actually stood, not where I assumed I stood.
2 Fill the gaps. study material aimed at the specific domains I was weak in, not a full curriculum start to finish.
3 More practice exams. Volume, both for breaking down questions and for endurance.
4 Mindset prep. The final stretch wasn’t too much content consumption . It was more drilling the “best answer, not correct answer” reasoning until it was automatic.
I won’t go deeper than that because plenty of people here have already covered the details well.
But I’ll say the obvious… this exam, it’s doable, if you prepare.
You just need to know how to take this test.
To this community: thank you. To everyone sitting for it soon: good luck, you’ve got this.
What’s next: the endorsement process.
And maybe CCSP after that.
Maybe.
Ask me again in a month.