Learn and Work Smarter

135. The Effort Trick (That Gets You Everything You Want)

• Katie Azevedo • Episode 135

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Don’t get me wrong – goals are awesome to have. They can inspire hope and dreams and cool visions we have for our futures.


But focusing on the outcome we want (aka our goal) never gets us the outcome we want. I know, the irony.


In this week’s episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I reveal why outcome-based goals are designed to make us fail, and the mistake I see students and professionals make when they set these kinds of goals.


Then I share the secret effort trick (bahaha, it’s not really a secret) that will get you closer to your goals than literally anything else.


What You Learn:

  • The biggest mistake students and professionals make when setting goals
  • How outcome-based goals set you up to fail
  • What outcome-based goals do to your confidence
  • The right way to set goals so that you actually have a chance of meeting them
  • The effort trick that’s basically magic and gets you everything you want


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Hello and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. This is episode 135. I'm Katie, your host, and today we're talking about a common mistake that I see students and professionals make so often. It is the kind of mistake that seems small, but if you don't know that you're making it, the consequences of that mistake can literally prevent you from reaching your goals and in the scope of everything that you want for yourself and what I want for you reaching your goals is pretty high up there on the list. Wouldn't you think? All that to say that this mistake can have pretty big consequences, but also it's super avoidable once you know it's a mistake and once you become aware that you're making it. All right. If you are watching this episode on YouTube, be sure to subscribe to the show. If you're listening in a podcast app, be sure to tap that follow button somewhere. I think it looks like a plus. So then you don't miss future episodes, and then come find me on Instagram. I'm at Schoolhabits so that we can stay connected between our Thursday episodes. Remember, with all of these episodes, you can either speed me up or slow me down. You can grab the transcript at learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/135. You can take notes. Just do what you gotta do to extract what you can from this episode so that you can take action on the strategies we talk about. Alright, let's begin. All right, so what is this common mistake that I so dramatically claimed has the potential to derail your entire life? It is to focus on the wrong lever when trying to accomplish a goal or an objective that you have for yourself. I feel like that was a lot of words, but as a result of focusing on this wrong lever without knowing that that's what's happening, you're getting frustrated, you are giving up before you even have a chance to be successful and never understanding what happened. In episode 106, I talked about an anti goal setting strategy, which touches on, or at least is like the foundation of what we're gonna talk about today. I am gonna leave that link in the description box if you're watching on YouTube, and it will be in the show notes if you are, you know, listening on an app. But today we are going deeper. So let me frame the episode for you so that you know what we're covering and in what order. First, I'm gonna explain what I mean by pulling the wrong lever and then the impact that that can have on basically everything that we set out to do. And then I'm gonna share examples of what this looks like for students in the academic space. And then I'll shift over to examples in a professional context.'cause I know that my listeners, you know, come from both groups. So when I, and of course then I'm gonna share what, what to do instead. So when I say the common mistake I see is that students and professionals are pulling the wrong lever when trying to reach a goal or accomplish something. This is what I mean, you focus on the outcome. The thing that they wanna achieve rather than on the effort and the actions they need to take to ever have a chance to reach that outcome. Now, a really basic example that has nothing at all to do with learning and working smarter is somebody saying like, I need to lose 20 pounds. But having no real plan to make that happen. No action steps that they take every single day to make that 20 pound weight loss happen. They just declare that that is what they want, and then they get frustrated when it doesn't happen, and then they give up on the goal altogether, thinking like, this just isn't for me. But the reality is that that's, you know, not how we accomplished anything. In episode 54, it was one of my favorite episodes to record. It's called The Secret Ingredient Behind Every Accomplishment Ever. I do want you to go listen to that. Okay, but let me give you a little spoiler about what the, the core message is there. That the secret ingredient behind every single accomplishment ever is action. The magic is in the action. Declaring that you want a 4.0 GPA or a promotion, or a million dollars or a 20 pound weight loss, none of that means anything without taking action, and that's the mistake that I see students and professionals making, just declaring that they want something. But having no plan to make it happen. I wanna get into this college. I wanna get an A on this test. I wanna improve my grades, I wanna get promoted. I wanna get that dream job. I want recognition for my role on this team. I wanna start a company. These are all wonderful things to want, but without concrete action steps that you take probably most every day, the goals don't happen. You don't accomplish the thing. And then well-meaning students and professionals with those well-meaning really good goals that they deserve to reach, get frustrated that they didn't achieve what they wanted to achieve, and then they give up. Never realizing that their goal is like right around the corner and super achievable if only they had a different way to go about it. What is that different way? Focusing on action and effort, not outcome. So here is the underlying message that I want you to keep in mind as we move through the episode today. Focusing on the outcome we want will never give us the outcome we want, but focusing on the small daily actions that we can control, the daily efforts that we can control will get us closer to that desired outcome than anything else. When we focus on the outcome on what we want, the grades, the GPA, the college admission, the promotion, the job, whatever it is, we almost always set ourselves up for failure from the very beginning. We're not even giving ourselves a chance to try for the goal to see if we can do it because we're not doing anything to make it happen and then when it doesn't happen, because like why would it, we get frustrated and we start believing that the goal was perhaps maybe too hard or too lofty, or we're not good enough or something is wrong with us. So we lower our bar and we set smaller goals, and that is not at all what we are here to do. So let's first work through what this looks like in a few different academic contexts for students, and then I'm gonna move into the professional space. Maybe some of these scenarios will apply directly to you. Maybe some are close enough to what you're dealing with and you can still see their application to your life. So let's start with tests. I can't tell you how many times I have had students tell me that they want an a on an upcoming test. And that is a great goal. And my first question in response to that goal is like, okay, well what's the plan? Today's Monday the test is, I don't know, next Monday, what actions are you gonna take today, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, in order to get an A on Monday's test? And this question will stump students. They're like, well, I'm gonna study this weekend. So what? That's like one or two days before the test. And also to study is such a vague term that hardly constitutes a plan. And so then what we do, or what I do is I say, okay, well how about tonight? You start by figuring out what's gonna be on the test and then narrow the topics down and make a list. Okay? And then Tuesday you can start organizing your study materials. You can print things out if you need to. Make sure you have all of the materials that you're going to need to make your study resources from. Wednesday, you might actually start making flashcards or practice questions. Students can even start feeding some of their, you know, previous quiz questions or homework questions into AI and ask AI to generate similar practice questions so that they can use those practice questions to study. But none of this is happening the night before the test, right? And then each day leading up to the test they're testing themselves using active recall study methods, and this is happening on pretty much every day leading up to the Monday test, right? That's the action. That's the effort. That's the thing that takes you closest to the desired outcome. Declaring that you want an A on the test is not gonna get you an A on the test, but using active recall study techniques and space repetition on most days leading up to the test will get you closer to that A than anything else can. And it's the same thing with students who want. You know, in a overall, in a, in a certain class, like I can think of, I can think of one student in particular, I'm not gonna name their name, uh, whose goal was to apply and to get into ultra competitive universities. Okay? This was like last college application season and their AP physics grade was a B and they wanted to get it to an A. Obviously this is a very smart student, very, very competitive, right? Because that's what would. Well, that's what was needed in order to maintain like their academic profile for their college apps.'cause again, they were applying to elite colleges. So when he was like, I need to get this B to an A minus, I was like, what's the plan? And he was like, well, what do you mean? What's the plan? And I was like, what's the plan? Like how are we gonna get this B to an A minus? Because that is essentially a mathematical equation, right? You have to see how many tests and assignments are left, how much they're weighted, what you need to score on each one to nudge that B up to see if it's even possible to achieve in the first place. And then from there you need a study plan that's probably different from what you've been using in order to increase the likelihood of getting those good test grades that take you closer to the A in the class, right? And then also homework. Maybe you need a new homework routine or different study strategies, different learning strategies so that you're maximizing your points. There too, which will also contribute to the larger goal of getting an A in the class. You can't get a B to an A minus without taking very specific actions every single day that nudge, that grade up. Proceeding as you've been proceeding with the same strategies, it's just gonna keep, you know, giving you the B that you currently have. Like that's the conversation that you know I had with the kid. Another academic scenario I deal with a lot is students taking standardized tests, so like the SAT or the A CT and wanting to get a certain score in order to increase their college application. Now I might have a student tell me, you know, I need a 1350 or a 1400 on the SAT, or I need a 32 on the a CT. Again, I'm like, okay, like great goal. What's the plan? Declaring that you want a certain score on a standardized test requires students to take very particular actions on most days leading up to the test. I have been tutoring students in the SAT and the A CT for over 20 years, so it's my job to help these students come up with their plan to figure out what their starting score is, to give 'em some diagnostic tests, to analyze the type of questions that they're getting wrong, to teach them those strategies and skills, and then to make sure that they're taking multiple practice exams and doing tons of practice questions leading up to the test so that they can get closer to the scores that they want. Now, of course, there's still no guarantee of getting those exact scores because anything can happen on test day, but there is literally no better strategy for accomplishing what you want to accomplish than saying, okay, what do I need to do to make that happen? Coming up with a plan and then actually taking the action. Okay, so in the past three scenarios, getting a good grade on a test, getting a good grade in a class, and then, I dunno, getting a, a particular goal score on a standardized test. Those are pretty, you know, common academic scenarios, but even the best plans in the world for reaching all of those three goals won't happen if you don't take the action required. And that's where you actually have to look at your calendar and say, okay, when am I gonna take this practice test? When am I gonna study? What day? What time? From when to when? How am I gonna change my homework routine in a way that I'm not rushed and I have time to check my comprehension and make sure I understand this stuff? Where on my calendar do I have the open space to, you know, use spaced repetition study sessions? And then actually sit down and do the work. It is a combination of creating the plan and sitting down and doing the work, taking the action that brings you to your goals, not the declaration of wanting to reach your goals, and not even just creating the plan itself. It's the combination of creating the plan and doing the work. That, as I said at the top of this episode, is the secret ingredient behind every accomplishment ever. Now a few other common academic scenarios that might apply to your situation where focusing on effort and action is really the only way to reach the outcome you want. Um, improving a specific skill. So let's say note taking for example, you know, you struggle with note taking in class. Maybe you're always looking around the room. You're wondering what people are writing down. You're wondering how to know what's important, how to keep up.'cause like the teacher's talking so fast, you're like, how do you write down? Like when, when I can't even hear the teacher at the same time and you're like, man, this is something that I need to get better at. Okay, well, what are you gonna do to get better at it? What strategies are you going to try? What note taking methods are you gonna experiment with? Of course, the right answer is to get my note taking power system. This is where I teach you exactly how to take fast, simple notes in class. Yes, that's linked below. The specific note taking strategies that I teach you in that program is the effort and the action you have to take if you ever wanna get better at note taking. Or let's say you wanna get better at writing. You don't think you're a strong writer. Okay, that's fair enough. That's a great goal. But what are you gonna do to become a better writer? Probably read more and write more, but that's only the beginning of the plan. What are you gonna read and how much more? What are you gonna write and how much more? Maybe you make a specific reading goal of like 20 minutes a night. 20 minutes a night, compounds over time to a lot of exposure to language and writing styles. Maybe part of your plan to become a better writer involves journaling like five minutes a day, maybe you Google journaling prompts to become a better writer, maybe you ask AI to give you 365 journal prompts to make you a better writer. No reason you can't do that. I actually have a journal. I sell a, a physical product, the executive function journal. I've sold this for years. I think I usually link that below, but there's 90 different journal prompts that are really accessible, really simple to get you to practice writing. At the same time, it builds your executive functions. Now the only way to become a better writer is to write more and to be, you know, exposed more to language. So that's what you have to do pretty much most days if you truly wanna become a better writer. If you're a student, you could ask your teacher a professor to give you more specific feedback on your writing. Yes. Students do this. Yeah. You're writing your essays in school to get a grade, of course. But many students just look at their grade and they're like, oh, okay. And they never look at the feedback or they never even ask, you know, the professor any follow up questions once they get their essays back. The students I work with look for more. You could take your paper to your English professor and say like, what could I do to make this paper stronger? What feedback do you have about my writing style? What areas of this paper are structurally weak? How can I make my argument stronger? If you wanna become a better creative writer, practice creative writing and write creative short stories. Again, this is all action and effort that you have control over. The outcome is what you don't have control over. It's just a declaration or a hope or a dream. A plan plus action equals goal accomplishment. All right. I've covered a lot of academic scenarios, so let's move on now to a professional context. Let's say that your goal is to find another job. A lot of times I work with professionals who have this goal and they've spent months, if not years, just stuck, like unhappy in their same job, saying over and over again that they want another job. But as we know by now, reaching that goal requires a plan and taking the action. Like literally, how else is it gonna happen? Like somebody tell me, somebody tell me I'm wrong here. Like, if you want something to happen, you have to do it. Like I, I am standing here waiting for somebody to prove me wrong. So you have to think, what are the steps I need to take to get another job? Well, there's research. There's updating your resume, there's updating your LinkedIn profile, thinking about the connections that you already have, um, surveying the market and seeing what's out there, applying, doing the interviews, and each of these tasks can be done in phases. You don't have to do it like all in one sitting. You could update your resume and your LinkedIn profile in a, a single day. If you really wanted, you could research the job market and create a list of jobs that you wanna apply to. I don't know, maybe in a week you could send out your applications to all those jobs in a single day if you really wanted to. But that's the action that you have to take if you wanna get the job. And this is the point in the plan where a lot of professionals will say like, well, when am I gonna have time to do that? I don't know. Weekends before nine, after five during your lunch break. If it's really a goal you have, you might have to face the inconvenience for a while of shifting things around and doing things at times that you'd rather not do them. That's usually the difference between people who reach their goals and people who don't, right? The people who do aren't thrown off track when they have to do things after hours or before hours or work a little harder to complete the action they said they had complete. That's just how stuff works. If the goal is really worth it to you find a way. Now another workplace scenario, you might have a broader goal of getting more organized. That is a great goal. But what does that mean? What does that mean you'll be doing each day? Does that mean you wanna manage your email better? Maybe keep your desk clear, manage your digital files more effectively, your projects All the above. Awesome. But what does that mean you'll be doing each day? Let's take just as an example, email management just to start. We could come up with a plan where for just 10 minutes a day, you go clear your email inbox and you do broad searches for common types of emails you get that are, I don't know, maybe like always junk. You do a mass search for those and you delete. If you don't have any of those and you just wanna get better at processing your inbox. Cool. What does that look like each day? I teach email management Inside SchoolHabits University. I also have an episode on this show with email management Basics. That's episode 15, so like the early days. I will leave that linked below. But for most people, email management looks like processing your inbox at least once a day by going in and opening up the emails. Doing something with them, either deleting them if they're junk or extracting tasks from those emails and putting 'em in your task management system and or extracting time sensitive information and putting them in your calendar. Those are really the only emails you need to do something with. If you wanna keep an email because it's something to reference, great. You can do that. You can leave it in there, you can archive it, whatever. But email management means opening emails and Extracting what you need from those emails and putting it in the right system. Usually task management or your calendar and doing that 10 minutes a day and you have an organized inbox, right. Let's go through another scenario. Let's say that you wanna start getting recognized for the work that you're putting into the team and your contributions to the company. Great goal. What's the plan? What are you gonna do every single day to reach that goal? Now, your first thought might be local. I don't know. Like I'm already working really hard. I can't do anything else to get recognition. I can't work any harder. And maybe that's true. If you are genuinely taking all the right action steps and the goal just still isn't happening, then maybe there are factors at play that are, you know, beyond your control. There's always factors at play that are beyond our control, but we can't focus on those. For example, maybe your boss is never inside the office so they don't see what you contribute and how much you work. Maybe your boss has some kind of favoritism toward, you know, a another employee. I don't know. You can't control that. But on this show, we only ever focus on what we can control. So let's say that again. Let's say again that your first response is there's nothing you can do. I want you to really investigate that response and ask yourself. Is that really true? Maybe the thing you're putting all of your effort into is not the type of thing that gets rewarded at your company. Maybe you're making beautifully designed PowerPoint presentations, but your manager doesn't value that. They value problem solving and on the spot contributions during meeting. Okay, well then that's what you're gonna have to start doing. Maybe they value team communication. Okay, so every day make an effort to demonstrate more communication. The recognition won't happen overnight, but obviously what you've been doing hasn't been giving you the result that you wanted thus far. So you, probably have to do something different. That's just how it works. But my question to you is what will that be and when will you do it? Now another workplace goal someone might have is to nail a killer presentation that you're gonna make at an upcoming meeting. Awesome. That will likely lead to recognition and maybe more opportunities. Great goal. But to achieve that goal, you've gotta figure out the action steps that you have control over. So what could that look like? Maybe get your hands on some examples of previous presentations at your company that went over really well. Duplicate what made those successful. Start early so you can adjust and revise your work without feeling rushed for time. You can work on it a little bit each day. You can schedule time into your calendar to make it happen. Do your research to make sure that your data is right, and that you're presenting exactly what you're supposed to be presenting on. You get the idea here. These are the small daily efforts, the small daily actions that you have control over. These are what move you toward your goal of nailing a killer presentation that you want recognition for. And again, that's the secret to having everything you want, having a goal, figuring out what needs to happen to achieve that goal, and then taking consistent action even when you don't feel like it. I'm gonna share a personal example here if that's helpful. Um, this is actually a fairly recent example too. So the day that this episode airs in July, 2026, i'll have just returned from a two week vacation in Portugal with my family and my in-laws who are from Portugal. Now, my goal for that long vacation was not to have to do any media work during those two weeks. Media meaning podcasting and blog posts, and scripting videos, editing, things like that. So that was my goal, but I knew that I needed to take a whole bunch of daily action steps for the three weeks leading up to that vacation to make it happen. So what did I do? I took out a piece of paper. Yes.'cause I'm so analog and I took out my content calendar. I mapped out how many podcast episodes I would need to record in advance. There would be two for the two weeks I was away, and then I wanted an additional one for the week that I came back. Oh my goodness. I'm so glad I did because I actually, if you follow me on Instagram, you'll know that this happened. But I got stranded in Portugal. Ha Our, um, flight got canceled with no explanation and they said the soonest we have is two days later and we were traveling with nine people. The logistics were ha they were fun. Um, but if I hadn't planned ahead and had that extra podcast episode, like locked and loaded and created, I would've basically been screwed. But anyway, I knew I'd arrive home on a Monday Red Eye. Turned out it was a Wednesday, but whatever. I didn't want to worry about that Thursday's episode. So I needed in my mind to record three podcast episodes before I left on vacation. Okay. And that was just the beginning though, because each episode, this is a little sneak behind the curtain, but every episode needs to be researched, outlined with like bullet points, recorded, edited the video and the audio. Uploaded and scheduled for YouTube, on the podcast apps, my website, which is like the learn and work smarter.com website, so that's three different places. I needed to write my show notes and description boxes with all of the relevant links, again, for all three episodes in all three places. So in the three weeks leading up to my vacation, I looked at my calendar and I made time each day to take small daily actions to plan, to outline, to record, to edit, to schedule, to do all the writing bits for all three episodes. And I made it happen. And you listening to this episode, you know, when I just returned from the mountains of Portugal, is a result of me focusing on effort and action instead of outcome. Can you imagine the result if I just declared like, I need to prepare three podcast episodes for vacation without doing anything to make that happen? It wouldn't happen. But we do that all the time. So my question to each of you listening is this, what is something that you wanna achieve or do? Maybe something that you've been wanting for a while. Maybe you've been frustrated that you haven't achieved it yet. Maybe you've started blaming yourself or your skill level, or the goal for being too big. Maybe you've even started blaming others for your situation. That's a common occurrence too, when we don't reach our goals. But what is the thing that you want? Think about it. Name it. I'm serious here. I'm not being abstract, and I don't want you to be abstract in this exercise either. Do you have it in your head? Can you picture it? Good. Now, when this episode was over, it's almost over, I want you to seriously think about what needs to happen in order for you to reach that goal. What levers can you pull that will bring you closer to it? What actions can you start taking right now and on most days so that you start taking back control of your goals and your accomplishments? Otherwise, they're just hopes and dreams and wishes and desires, and those are fun to have and to daydream about. But here on this show, here on the Learn and Work smarter podcast we are all about making things happen. If you want my help making things happen, SchoolHabits University is the best place to start. Alright, my friends, that brings us to the end of the show. I hope I got you thinking and inspired you to take some action. That's my goal for you. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with someone you think might find it helpful too. Remember, you can find me on Instagram at SchoolHabits to stay connected between our weekly episodes. As always, keep showing up. Keep doing the hard work, keep asking the hard questions, and never stop learning.

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Katie Azevedo

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