Every so often, and actually pretty regularly these days, I ask myself, “self? What are you doing with your life?” Well, let me tell you.

A while ago, Overstock.com’s CEO Patrick Byrne was on NPR doing an interview. Apparently he has a good friendship with the legendary Warren Buffet, and so the interviewer was questioning Byrne on that relationship and some of the ways that it had influenced Byrne’s life. In response to one of the questions, Byrne shared this analogy that Buffet had told him at some point:

You see, life is like a baseball game where you’re perpetually up to bat. So more like a home run derby, actually. Anyway, life will throw you lots of pitches. Some will be good, and some will be bad, and the temptation is going to be to swing at all the good pitches. The problem is, if you swing at all the good pitches, you might knock a few, but you’ll be exhausted from all the swinging. Instead, you should sit and wait for a big, fat, slow pitch right over the middle. And once that pitch comes along, you swing away for all you’re worth, and because you’ve saved your energy, your odds of hitting it out of the park are multiplied.

I’ve chosen to adopt this strategy, so anytime I ask myself what I’m doing, I tell myself that I’m waiting on a big, fat, slow pitch. I just hope that life keeps throwing.