If you throw a handful of poo at a fan, some of it is going to stick.
In the middle of my lesson, my saxophone teacher paused to share that analogy. He wanted me to know that when he shared anecdotes, advanced concepts, and creative ideas, he didn’t necessarily expect me to remember everything. The goal was breadth — inspiring my creativity and motivating me to keep working hard.
But this approach came with a tradeoff. Neither of us could say with certainty what, exactly, I would take away from that day’s lesson.
Thinking empirically makes a different tradeoff on the spectrum of breadth vs. depth (1). Rather than explore many related ideas at once, it narrows the scope to a small number of clearly defined learning objectives.
This often means changing only one thing at a time while keeping everything else the same. Let’s go back to our pasta sauce example to illustrate the difference between these two approaches.
When we surveyed the landscape of pasta sauce solutions, we found that there are core ingredients we’re not going to want to mess with (tomatoes, olive oil, onion, garlic, and salt), as well as well as elements ripe for experimentation (herbs, spices, and fat):
- Poo at fan strategy: keep all of the core ingredients, but make multiple changes to other elements based on what I predict will be the best. For example, maybe I remove butter, oregano, and red pepper flakes in the next attempt.
- Thinking Empirically strategy: keep everything identical except for one thing. For example, I know I don’t like spicy pasta sauce, so try removing red pepper flakes.
You might be asking yourself why, if I think making multiple changes is going to create my ideal sauce, would I slow myself down by making only one change at a time? It feels faster to just try it, right?
But it actually slows down learning.
Let’s say that you do in fact like your new sauce better than the original.
If you changed only one thing (removed red pepper flakes), your conclusion is clear. Don’t put red pepper flakes in future pasta sauces that you make.
But if you changed multiple things at once, your conclusion is ambiguous. Was it the butter? The oregano? The pepper flakes? Some combination of those three? If you don’t know, you can’t make an informed decision the next time you make pasta sauce.
This is how you save time and build confidence by thinking empirically – everything you test out produces a clear, transferable insight. These insights compound, and over time you build a knowledge base that enables more reliable, predictable decision making that gets you the results you want.
To benefit from this compounding learning, you need to record it. In the final part of the framework we’ll tackle how to keep track of how it went.
Part 5: Keep Track of What You Did and How it Went
- I hope I’ve been very clear that there is great value to breadth-focused learning – inspiring creativity and motivating future learning are extremely important. The approach you take to learning depends on the goal you want to achieve – take another look at our post on “Defining Your Goal” for a refresher.
Thinking Empirically 