No matter how wonderful, there’s always some leftover.
You can’t “optimize” sauce.
As any decent cook out there knows, when you make a good sauce, no matter how wonderful it is, there is always some left over. Some amount of sauce that never reached the lips of its intended eater.
We see it all the time with ketchup (something I swore off over two decades ago, but that’s for another time). You pour ketchup on your plate and, as needed, deploy your “freedom” fries to deliver that extra flavor to your taste buds.
You eat all the fries. There is always a remnant of ketchup on the plate.
Same thing with a steak. You’ll darn sure eat every bite of it, but that delectable au poivre sauce you slaved over? Sop some of it with bread or potatoes, but often a lot of it’s left on the plate, and you end up washing it down the sink.
The sad thing is that it’s usually way harder to make the sauce than to cook the steak. Same thing with fries. Get the potato out of the ground, wash, slice, fry, and serve. The ketchup or any other sauce has a lot more moving parts, but also a lot more flavor.
I query the reader: Are we thus “optimizing” our sauces?
I’d argue the answer is a resounding, “NO.”
But my retort would also challenge the questioner, “Why should we optimize sauces in the first place? The remaining ‘throw-away’ part is in the inherent nature of a sauce.”
The point? Do we just waste things and not worry about it?
No, but many of us try to optimize every little piece of our lives. Every minute. Every word. Even everything we eat and drink.
Some of it is just sauce. Parts of life can’t be optimized.
Instead? Enjoy it. Get as much as you can out of it before it goes away.
Our $297 Platform Domination Consult is designed to help you figure out what is sauce and what is steak.
Such things are easy when you’re looking at a dinner plate, but not so simple when life tends to be a series of abstractions.
Life is meant to be lived (and enjoyed as much as possible).
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© 2026 by Brian D. O’Leary. All rights reserved.
