*Typing*

You should choose a vocation and commit to it for as long as you possibly can. You should commit to it until you have abundantly clear evidence that you should do something different. People change life courses faster and more often than a chipmunk high on crack-cocaine; and they wonder why they don't get anywhere.

Investor Charlie Munger coined a term called "sit-on-your-ass-investing". He was notorious for making one to two investments every few years and then holding onto those investments for decades at a time. He cited his reasoning as: paying less to brokers, listening to less nonsense and gaining an extra 1 to 3 percentage points a year in tax breaks.

Choosing and committing to a vocation has its own unique set of advantages.

For one, as you become better at something, you learn to enjoy that something––and so with commitment comes fulfillment.

For two, once you become good at something––and perhaps even great at something––your earning potential doing that something increases substantially. Look at any vocation and you will find that "great" earns 2x, 3x and sometimes 10x as much as "good".

For three, few people have the ability to commit to one thing for a very long time and so with each passing year, your commitment will reward you with your competitors dying like grapes on the vine.

Without fig wasps, there are no figs. Fig wasps enter into the flowers on a fig tree to lay their eggs; and in doing so, they pollinate the flowers. Monkeys, birds, fruit bats and the like then eat the the figs like candy. Figs are a laxative so these animals shit all over the ground, which supplies the soil with dense nutrients as well as seeds to grow more fig trees. This is called interconnectedness. The Naturalist John Muir wrote that, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." Being that we are a part of nature, we aren't exempt from the laws of interconnectedness. When we are considering removing or adding something in our lives and our work, we must also consider the impact of that something on the broader ecosystem. Not just our physical ecosystem but our mental and emotional ecosystem as well.

Buddhists believe suffering is caused by what are known as the three poisons. The Bhavachakra, or the wheel of life, is a visual portrayal of the Buddhist view of the universe. It depicts these three poisons as a pig, a cock and a snake. The pig represents ignorance, the cock represents craving and the snake represents anger. You don't have to be a Buddhist to see clearly the correlation between the three poisons and suffering. Each of our lives would be made better if we sought to replace ignorance with wisdom, craving with gratitude and anger with forgiveness.

When we think of passion, we think of love. But, passion is something far more beautiful than love. Passion is loving something so deeply, that you're willing to endure a tremendous amount of suffering in the name of that something. Passion stems from the Latin word Pati, which quite literally means "to endure" or "to suffer". In biblical texts, Christ's dying days nailed to the cross are described as The Passion. You don't have to be Christian to understand the gravity of those particular words in that particular situation. When you view passion through the lens of suffering, you realize that finding your passion is less about finding something you love; and instead finding something you're willing to suffer for.

It's difficult to sit still when you're busy because, well, you're busy. You've got a long list of stuff you should be doing and it's impossible to do this stuff when you're sitting still. So, we don't still. Instead, we stay busy until we die. We create busyness to distract ourselves from our higher calling. Unchecked, this compounds into a life abundant in busyness but scarce in purpose. By sitting still for just ten minutes, at the busiest point in your day, it allows you to slow yourself down long enough to remind yourself of why you are here. Suddenly, all those items that might seem so pressing, fall away like sheets of ice atop a slanted roof amid an exceptionally sunny winter's day.