I/O Ratio

I read somewhere that Todd Combs, whom Warren Buffett has apparently chosen to succeed him as head of investments at Berkshire Hathaway, reads 500 pages a week, and I thought: "that's something to aspire to."  I have no idea how much I read each week.

But, as this blog demonstrates, just reading doesn't quite do it. There is a compulsion, on the other side, to expel some of the accumulated and combined thoughts. As I'm more or less writing for a living now, this acuity of this need is at times "fulfilled" by my work, or, rather, it is displaced by the grunt work of putting together "professional" and targeted thoughts.

But my question to myself is, how much of the burning need to write is straight up ego?  Certainly there's an aspect of getting the thoughts validated by readers, which can be measured by my (monumental, to be sure) site traffic, as well as by the quality and sheer girth of the enlargement themed poetry that it inspires. Though surely haiku would do because (as I've been told many times [for reasons I don't quite understand]) size doesn't matter.

The truly egoless, or zen way, would probably be to accumulate knowledge and perhaps wisdom for its own sake, and not share it.  Or would that be the proverbial sound of one hand clapping or, as the case may be, doing something else?