Have you ever taken a look at the reviews for your favorite restaurant and found there are a surprising number of haters?

Opinions can vary, but the more you search the more you will find that disagreement often reflects different goals, not different facts. Maybe a negative review focused on slow service while I was mainly interested in delicious, high-quality food. Perhaps someone had a negative experience in-restaurant, but I ordered takeout.

Finding the “best” restaurant depends on what you consider to be the perfect dining experience. And the same is true for almost any problem we face. There are many possible solutions, but the right one depends on the goal you have.

Cooking is a perfect example of this dynamic. As an avid pasta eater and someone who genuinely enjoys cooking, developing my own everyday pasta sauce felt like a fun challenge. With a small set of inexpensive, easy-to-find ingredients, there was real opportunity to create something better than the generic options on my grocery store’s shelves. More importantly, it presented a perfect opportunity for experimentation.

Because research and experimentation are central to my work life — and because I’m a huge nerd always looking for excuses to apply empirical thinking to everyday life — I realized I could use this same structured process to develop my own sauce.

If you’re new here, you can read about How to Think Empirically and find an overview of the Thinking Empirically Framework under the Thinking Empirically Fundamentals menu. This post is the first of five to walk through the key pillars of the framework, using my pasta sauce experimentation as a practical, hands-on example of how thinking empirically can work in real life. Each week I’ll add a post on the next pillar to flesh out the full framework. You can follow along with this process in your own kitchen or, if cooking isn’t your thing, adapt the framework to an everyday challenge that matters most to you.

Part 1: Defining Your Goal

Before grabbing the pots and pans and getting the spices out of the cabinet, I needed a clearly defined objective. To set myself up for success I needed to first decide what success would actually look like. Without this step, I could easily invest a lot of time and effort without getting closer to what I want to achieve.

This is where the SMART framework can be a huge help. It is widely used in business, performance management, and research-informed settings, with the idea of setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals.

• Specific: Are we talking about tomato sauce or alfredo? Cooking for two or twenty? Kids or adults? Weeknight survival or dinner party? Specificity narrows the solution space.
• Measurable: How will you know if you succeeded? This doesn’t need to be fancy. Recording a thumbs up/thumbs down, one-to-five star rating, or even focusing on prep & cooking time as the key metric is fine.
• Achievable: What constraints matter? The “perfect” sauce must operate within real-world limits — budget, time, skill, effort. A solution you can’t sustain isn’t a solution.
• Relevant: Is this worth solving? Do you eat pasta often enough to justify the effort? Or is this a once-a-year problem? Thinking empirically does take effort, so let’s make sure it’s worth it.
• Time-bound: How long are you willing to invest in solving this problem? Do you need this by next week, or is this an open-ended project? Defining this up front prevents burn out.

Here is how I defined my goal:

• Specific: Develop an everyday, tomato-based sauce for casual lunches 1–2 times per week. The key audience is me — I’m the primary pasta-eater.
• Measurable: Maintain a notebook recording ingredients, quantities, methods, tasting notes, and a simple thumbs-up / thumbs-down decision.
• Achievable: Use affordable, standard grocery store ingredients. Limit prep and cooking to roughly one hour per week.
• Relevant: I eat pasta regularly enough for this to meaningfully improve my daily life (and potentially save money).
• Time-bound: No fixed timeline. This is a fun personal project rather than a deadline-driven task.

By clearly defining the goal, I dramatically narrowed the solution space. I now knew what kind of sauce I was making, who it needed to satisfy, what constraints mattered, and how I would recognize success.

But before diving into experimentation, there’s one more critical step: deciding if this is the goal I want to prioritize using my time and effort to solve. That’s where we’re headed next week.

Next: Part 2: Decide the Right Level of Effort