A Table of Contents

So many roads

Nicholas Teague
From the Diaries of John Henry
15 min readJan 25, 2018

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Book 1: Explorations

August 2016 — July 2017

Book 2: Essays

August 2017 — August 2018

Book 3: Entrepreneurship

August 2018 — June 2019

Book 4: Everything

September 2019 — July 2020

Book 5: Etcetera

August 2020 — August 2021

Book 6: Endurance

September 2021 — August 2022

Introduction

It’s been a fun trip writing in this medium. Having ventured down so many roads over the last year or two, it seemed appropriate to consolidate these writings into a sort of table of contents for ease of browsing. Collected here are all of my posts in chronological order. Although they could certainly be read in the order presented if one was so inclined, I would offer that the writing probably improved over the course of the journey — this was my first real venture into the written word outside of 140 character increments (other than a few stray blog posts on an internal board with my last employer). I started with the intent to explore, and although no single consistent theme was ever settled on, if you dig a little you might find some recurring. It was no normal circumstances that led to this expedition, but I’ll leave that to the essays if you’re interested.

I’ll offer as a bit of explanation that it sometimes feels like I have a kind of speech impediment, one that may not be obvious but often coalesces in a kind of density of meaning for lack of a better description — many of the echos and patterns that can be found in these posts aren’t literary devices, they’re just how I think. This sometimes make plain speech or small talk challenging, but I get by. It’s kind of ironic that much of my career path has fallen into the sales umbrella, a rut I’ve only recently succeeded in escaping.

If you ever get a chance to dig into the essays of Paul Graham, you’ll find that he describes a writing process of getting a first draft out as quickly as he can but then spending weeks if not months editing and revising, soliciting comments, and only then finally settling on a polished form. Let’s just say that I took a different approach. The average time from a post’s conception to completion here was 2–3 days, and nothing took more than a week to finalize. As a result I think there is a certain energy carried through that might be lost otherwise, at a minimum it certainly leaves an impression of state of mind. (To be clear some of the more sophisticated topics were preceded by months if not years of study, but once I got going the writing part was pretty quick.) One thing I discovered about blogging is that every time you finish a post, every single time, it feels like this must be the final one — because you have no idea what else you could possibly write about :).

I apologize for the attempts at poetry, yes I agree those are pretty laughable.

I’m grateful to Medium for providing such a polished platform with a forgiving learning curve. I really do hope they succeed.

Book One: Explorations

August 2016

Every ride is different.

Book Two: Essays

August 2017

Photo taken after completion of a long run.

Book Five: Etcetera

August 2020

(image via NASA)

January 2021

image via NASA Juno mission
Grateful Dead — So Many Roads (Chicago July 9, 1995)

For more please check out my Book Recommendations and Music Recommendations.

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Nicholas Teague
From the Diaries of John Henry

Writing for fun and because it helps me organize my thoughts. I also write software to prepare data for machine learning at automunge.com. Consistently unique.