Book 1: Explorations
From the Diaries of John Henry
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 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
August 2016
September 2016
October 2016
Novembor 2016
February 2017
March 2017
July 2017
Fini
For more essays please check out my Table of Contents, Book Recommendations and Music Recommendations.
© Nicholas Teague 2017, all rights reserved
“From the Diaries of John Henry” is registered trademark of Nicholas Teague LLC
